


Paint It Black (and Red)

by MsCaptainWinchester (rons_pigwidgeon)



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fist Fights, Guns, M/M, Mixed Film and Comics Canon, No Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Suicide Attempts (by Wade)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2019-06-10 11:23:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15290475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rons_pigwidgeon/pseuds/MsCaptainWinchester
Summary: When Wade comes back from a failed extraction and finds out all his favorite people fell victim to Thanos, he's not just going to sit back and let the asshole win.OR The one where Wade saves the universe from the Giant Purple Douche, Deadpool style.





	1. All We Are Is Dust in the Wind

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel to Avengers: Infinity War. If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to be spoiled, I suggest you hit Mark For Later and hit the back button until you have.
> 
> I want to send a huge THANK YOU to the people who beta read this fic for me. This being my first Spideypool fic, I was understandably nervous, and y'all did a wonderful job of assuaging my nerves and helping me make this the best and most authentic fic it could be! Thank you so much to 9th_Pawn, Cliophilyra, and CommonWhiteDude for all your help!
> 
> I'm still writing this fic, but I'm motivated to get it finished in the next month or so. I'm setting a tentative posting schedule of every two weeks.
> 
> See End Notes for possible Trigger Warnings

Riding in the back of a pallet truck full of chicken cages on an unpaved back road in the heart of Colombia wasn't the most comfortable experience, but Wade had had worse. The heat felt like a dense blanket settled on his shoulders, dragging his energy down and sucking what little moisture was still in his body to the surface. His suit was sticking to his skin in less than pleasant ways, his sweat combining with the grit of road dust, making his already sensitive skin feel like it was being stripped off with a cheese grater. But there were positives. With his back pressed against the cab of the truck, he could hear the soft sounds of acoustic guitar and bongos accompanied by slow purring Spanish floating through the open window to mix with the sounds of unhappy chickens. Occasionally, Wade could hear their driver singing along.  He wasn't covered in itchy dried blood this time. And he had all his limbs.

More importantly, his mark had all her limbs.

" _He's so cute, you know? Big blue eyes, and his hair is so shiny and he wears it in this perfect pouffy style, you know?_ " The girl mimed hair swooping up over her forehead to demonstrate, her smile wide and so fucking heart eyes it made Wade want to turn her into an emoji. Skinny from weeks living in isolation and so filthy it was hard to tell what her natural skin tone was, she was still gorgeous. She was sitting cross-legged, wedged between two sets of rough wire cages, hands moving animatedly as she talked. Her only reaction to the cages on either side of her sliding into her sides was to occasionally coo at the chickens held inside. It was fucking adorable.

Peter would be rolling his eyes so hard at him right then. Wade just smiled and nodded, humming his understanding as she kept talking. She had been a buzz of excitement since they hopped in the back of the truck a mile outside of her extraction site. She started telling him about how happy she was to be going back to her home and the boy she was in love with—a boy who lived in the servants' quarters in the back of the house, and who Wade was certain her daddy didn't know about—and hadn't stopped for half an hour. Wade recognized a deflection when he saw one, but he couldn't blame her after what she'd been through in the last few weeks.

The dirty basement of the hovel he'd found her in had been more of a health hazard than his apartment, and the roaches were three times the size—fucking Colombian weather. Her daddy was not going to be pleased when he found out where those asswipes had been keeping his baby girl. Blood was going to run in the streets. But Wade wouldn't be a part of it, unfortunately. He promised Petey-pie that he'd keep his hands clean, and so far he'd kept that promise.

He pulled his phone out of one of his pouches, the girl's bright Spanish mixing with music and the sounds of the rough dirt road they were riding on and the angry chickens. It was a nice moment in an otherwise uneventful job, and he wanted to document it. He unlocked the phone, intending to text the boy a picture of Ximena's bright smile, but when he looked up to take the picture, she'd stopped talking and was looking queasy. In the space of a few moments, she started breaking apart into a thick brown ash, fear overtaking the happy smile she'd been wearing before her face disintegrated. Wade watched the fat brown flakes floating up and away into the air before dissipating in the sunshine, his heart hammering in his chest. He dropped the phone and reached out to where she had been sitting, spreading his hands out on the bare, rusty metal truck bed for any signs that this might be a joke.

"What the fuck?!" he shouted, scrambling to find any trace of her. His hands found nothing but empty air. He spun around on his knees, searching the rest of the area, but there was nothing beyond the battered wire cages and scattered tools. The chickens weren't much help, either.

Wade knocked on the back window of the truck and stuck his head through the open partition. " _Did you see that?_ " he asked the driver in Spanish, repeating himself in English and Portuguese when the driver shook his head at him, shrugging his shoulders.

He cursed under his breath, dropping back onto his ass on the uneven metal. The vast stretches of rolling green hills felt like an infinity of loneliness, everything so much quieter without her voice. There weren't even clothes left. "What the fuck?" he muttered to himself over and over again. "She fucking disappeared. That's not supposed to happen. That's not supposed to happen, right?" he asked himself, hoping the voices in his head would be able to give him a better answer, but they were as baffled as he was.

He grabbed his phone back up and texted Peter. If anyone would know if people could just disintegrate, it would be his little science nerd.

 

Wade: **Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck**

Wade: **My mark just poofed in front of me**

Wade: **WHAT**

Wade: **THE**

Wade: **FUCK**

Wade: **It wasn't even my fault**

Wade: **This time**

Wade: **Just did an extract**

Wade: **Riding in the back of a farmers truck**

Wade: **Shes telling me about her boyfriend**

Wade: **They in :heartemoji: :heartemoji: :heartemoji: So cute!!!!**

Wade: **And then she just…**

Wade: **:cloudemoji:**

Wade: **Is that normal?**

Wade: **Can people just poof into thin air?**

Wade: **Ive made people poof before but there's usually blood**

Wade: **And bullets**

Wade: **Sometimes grenades**

Wade: **Once a microwave pizza and a salad spinner**

Wade: **Fuck no ones gonna pay me now :sadfaceemoji: :sadfaceemoji: :sadfaceemoji: :sadfaceemoji:**

Wade: **And her daddys not gonna believe me fuck**

Wade: **Gotta hoof it outta colombia real quick**

Wade: **Im gonna miss taco tuesday**

Wade: **Sorry baby boy**

 

Wade thought about sending his client a text to let him know what happened, but doubted the guy would believe him, and he didn't need a cartel on his ass. He stared at the spot where she'd been sitting, hoping for answers that never came.

 

**5 days later…**

Cold metal was not comfortable no matter what the brochure said. Wade shifted around, trying to find a softer spot to no avail. The echoes of metal on metal and cargo shifting across rough floors filled his ears and made the voices in his head loud. Too loud. He got up from where he'd hidden away behind a row of crates, pulling a flashlight from one of his pouches, and began poking through around to find out what he was traveling with. "Maybe it'll be office furniture. Or booby implants," he murmured, trying to read the inscription on the side of a crate. "Please don't be beetles. Please don't be beetles."

The side of the crate gave him no clues, so he pulled his knife from his ankle holster and pried the lid off. "Sweet god of Colombian exports, thank you for making my fucking life," he said as he pulled out a jar of beef tamales. The next row of crates were filled with pickled suckling pigs. Wade did a victory dance. After three days hitch-hiking through the countryside to get to a coast, he was starving.

After scarfing down a can of delicious tamales, Wade pulled out his phone to brag about his score, aware that he didn't have a signal inside a storage unit buried three deep on a barge in the middle of the ocean. He typed out and 'sent' his texts anyway. Petey would get them when Wade got back to civilization.

Wade: **Hit the motherload with this container**

Wade: **Look at all these rows and rows of beautiful delicious tamales [picture attached]**

Wade: **Definitely not going hungry on this trip**

Wade: **Gonna eat myself sick on this ride**

Wade: **Cant wait!**

 

**8 days later…**

Wade: **This was a terrible idea**

Wade: **Diarhea**

Wade: **Everywhere**

Wade: **Id show you pics but you dont deserve that kind of trauma baby boy**

Wade: **I think I might die for real this time**

Wade: **Oh god**

Wade: **Send help**

Wade: **Im gonna need 100 sponge baths after this**

Wade: **Please??? :winkemoji: :winkemoji: :winkemoji:**

 

**Fifteen days later…**

The city was oddly quiet when he snuck out of the storage container and stumbled outside for the first time in two weeks. He was so dehydrated that his healing factor was the only thing keeping him upright, and he knew he stunk of sweat and diarrhea and sour vomit. All he wanted to do was find his nearest safe house and soak in a tub for three days. Hailing a cab was out of the question in his state. One whiff and no driver in his right mind would let Wade get in the back of his cab, and Wade didn't have the kind of cash on him to be persuasive. He started walking to the nearest subway, but found it blocked off with a giant closed sign. Made sense. It looked like someone had parked a van in the side of the entrance.

Wade noticed other signs of destruction as he walked further north, lines of cars parked at odd angles. Buildings with blown out windows and scorch marks like there'd been fires. A two-seater plane sticking out of the thirtieth story of an office building. There must have been another attack while Wade was gone. "And I missed all the fun shitting my guts out in a tin can in the middle of the ocean. Fucking typical," he muttered to himself. 

Wade had expected the noise to start up as he got further and further into the heart of the city, but it was like a fog covered the streets in melancholy. He passed the occasional tow truck pulling vehicles off the road and workers clearing debris, but even the noise of their equipment was subdued. Wade was too delirious to contemplate what it could mean.

Two hours after he stepped onto the docks, he finally made it to his front door. He slumped against it with a grateful sigh and fumbled around for his keys. "Al, can you let me in?" he called through the thin metal. There was no response. He cursed under his breath and finally found the keys in one of his back pouches and got the door open. He started stripping the suit off before the door was even closed. He left it in a pile in the middle of the living room and stumbled into the bathroom and right into the shower. It felt amazing to have the cool water running down his bare skin. He spent an hour with his face in the stream, mouth open, unmoving.

The apartment was still quiet as he shuffled down the hall to his room two hours later, dripping water in his wake. He barely noticed as he flopped down onto his bed. He was asleep with his next breath.

 

* * *

 

The sun hadn't quite peeked it's head over New York when he woke up. He wasn't sure how many days had passed, but he had a feeling it was at least two. He plugged his phone in to charge while he showered and got dressed. Still no sign of Al when he got out of the shower. He shrugged to himself and pulled on some sweats and his favorite Spider-Man hoodie.

 _Maybe she'd found a new guy to fuck_ , he mused to himself as he picked up the bits of his suit he'd left strewn across the living room. The smell nearly knocked him over. He unsheathed all his weapons and dumped the suit into a garbage bag to take to the cleaners later. Yan wasn't going to be happy with him, but he tipped her well enough that he knew she'd take care of it without too much complaint.

He whistled to himself as he went about the business of cleaning and stowing his weapons, talking to them as he polished each and put them in their respective casings. He felt refreshed and ready to see his favorite hero and make his absence up to him. He tipped his baseball hat towards Al's bedroom door as he backed out of the apartment, humming to himself as he headed towards Peter's favorite bakery.

Enzo nodded at Wade when the bell above the door announced his presence, but his usual casual cheer was missing. "The usual?"

"You bet. And add an extra chocolate danish for Petey. I left him hanging for a couple weeks. Gotta butter him up."

Enzo nodded, but stayed quiet as he made up Wade's order and checked him out. Wade tried to ignore the voices in his head muttering about how wrong the interaction was. Enzo was the most morning of morning people and usually talked Wade's ear off about his family. He'd been gone almost a month. There should at least have been a couple pictures of the grandkids to exclaim over. Instead, there was a tight nod and a brown paper bag was slid across the counter. Not even a 'have a good day' to send him off.

Wade shoved the wrongness off and headed in the direction of his favorite building in Queens. He passed by more signs of the destruction, more work crews hauling debris. More cars randomly parked without owners. A helicopter smashed on its side in the middle of an empty street. The subway was so backed up that it looked like it was going to be faster to cross the bridge on foot. Wade wondered what kind of monster had tried to destroy the city this time. Whatever it was had done a pretty thorough job.

He was still whistling to himself as he jumped up and snagged both hands on the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder leading up to Spidey's apartment an hour later. He pulled himself up and started climbing the ten flights up to the Parker windows, checking his phone again to see if Peter replied to his texts yet. **NO NEW MESSAGES**. He tucked the phone into his hoodie pocket as he took the final flight three steps at a time.

Wade peered in Spidey's open curtains, but didn't find the kid in his bed. "Not sleeping," he muttered, jimmying the lock with the tip of his butterfly knife and sliding the window up silently. He climbed through the opening, careful not to get his dirty shoes on the bedding. Inside, the room looked normal, messy closet, bed made haphazardly, textbooks and notebooks open on his desk, littered with old electronics and beakers full of the clear, viscous liquid Wade knew was his webbing.

Even with all signs of usual activity present, something niggled at the back of Wade's brain. "Where are you, baby boy?" he muttered to himself.

He sat on Peter's bed for a long while, twirling his knife between his fingers, picking up a book from next to the bed and flipping through it, playing with the Lego men lined up on Peter's desk. Fifteen minutes later there was still no sign of Peter. _Maybe he went to school early? That MJ chick's been getting real serious about fucking Mathletes._

A door closed further in the apartment, followed by soft footfalls, alerting Wade to Peter's aunt's presence. When the floorboards outside Peter's room creaked, Wade decided to beat a hasty retreat. He hadn't met Aunt May yet, but he'd heard enough stories not to want to piss her off, and finding a grown man wearing sweats and a hoodie alone in her nephew's bedroom probably wouldn't go over well. He deposited the greasy paper bag with Petey's danish on the desk with a little origami spider he made from a scrap of notebook paper and slipped back out the window, closing it behind him silently.

 

* * *

 

Three days of doing nothing was enough to have Wade antsy for some action. Spidey still hadn't texted him back, and neither had Weasel. He'd made a mountain of pancakes, beaten the latest Farcry game twice, taken his suit to the cleaners, and watched the entire fifth season the Golden Girls—the fibromyalgia episode still had him in tears, even after the hundredth re-watch.

Al still wasn't back from wherever she wandered off to, and he was starting to think she'd run away. Not fucking cool. He decided he had had enough of sitting around doing jack shit and pulled on some street clothes to head over to Sister Margaret's for a drink.

He checked his texts for the four hundredth time as he pulled the handle of the door to the bar, but it didn't budge under his hand. He frowned, yanking at it a few times. "What the fuck?" he muttered to himself. He circled round to the back and broke into the kitchen. Everything was still. "Weasel? Come on, man, I've been out of the country for a month. I'm gonna start making friends with the rats in my apartment if I don't get some human contact soon. Where are you, buddy?"

He got no response. "WEEEA-SELL. WEEZIE WEASEL, WHERE AR-RE YOU?" he sing-songed as he banged through the back room into the main bar. Silence. The air was stale on his tongue, musty in the way a place only got after being closed up for weeks in the humid New York summer heat.

 _Something's not right_ , he thought as he wandered further into the bar _._ "It sure as shit isn't," he said out loud as he grabbed a bottle of Jameson from behind the bar and cracked it open. He took a swig and settled onto the stool Weasel kept behind the bar, pulling out his phone again. "I'm starting to think everyone's at a party, and they didn't invite me. I don't think it's the fun kind, either." He thumbed through his contacts until he reached the first burner number he had for Buck. Whatever the fuck was going on was starting to annoy him. He hit CALL and leaned his back against the back counter.

" _Wilson?_ " Buck asked.

"Hey, you seen Weasel? I been gone on a job, and I get back to the bar closed up. What the fuck?"

There was a long pause on the other line, the only sound Buck's heavy breathing. " _I'm sorry, man. He's gone with the rest of them_ ," he said eventually.

"Was there a raid? It doesn't look like there was a raid." Wade looked around the empty bar. The chairs weren't put up the way they would be if Weasel had closed up normally, but there weren't empty glasses everywhere, either, and everything was neat behind the bar. Even the darts were put away. Now that he was looking for it, there was a thin layer of dust over every surface he could see.

" _Nah, man, he's just gone. Like everyone else. You know what I'm talking about._ "

Wade had no fucking clue, but it didn't sound like he was going to get an answer from that idiot. Shouldn't have called Fat Gandoff if he wanted real answers. "Thanks anyway," he said before ending the call. He tried another number, but the answer was just as vague.

 

Wade: **Did something happen while I was gone?**

Wade: **Weaz is gone Als gone You wont text me back**

Wade: **What the fuck happened??**

 

He swallowed a few more mouthfuls of whiskey before depositing the bottle back on its shelf and getting up. He was not going to get answers in an empty bar.

He stopped at one of Spidey's favorite hot dog vendors on his way to try Peter's apartment again and bought half a dozen dogs. "Hey Arvand, my man, been a while. You got that sweet extra kraut for me today?" he greeted, drumming his hands on the shiny metal of the cart.

Arvand's eyes were hooded over and his shoulders slumped. Wade hadn't realized until just that moment that it was a stance he'd been seeing all over the city. Everyone looked like they just walked out of a funeral. Not that New Yorkers are a cheery bunch on a good day, but Wade was starting to get a spidey sense of his own. "You seen Spider-Man lately?" he asked, leaning on the open slider of the cart as Arvand quietly gathered his order.

Arvand looked up sharply at the name, but then immediately back at his work. There was a new tremor to his hands as he spread the extra sauerkraut Petey liked on his dogs. "I been out of town awhile, but I haven't seen him since I got back," Wade continued, hoping to get more of a response.

Arvand handed him the bag of wrapped hot dogs and accepted his payment with trembling fingers, sweat beading on his brow, his eyes fixed on the blinding pattern of Wade's Hawaiian shirt and not his face. "You uh… you haven't read the news lately?" he asked, his accent three times thicker than normal and deeper as he stuttered over the words.

Wade took the bag, narrowing his eyes as he did. If he still had hair on his arms, it would be standing up. "I'm not much of a current events guy. Baby boy get kidnapped by aliens again? Something to do with all the destruction around here?"

Arvand swallowed hard, eyes darting up to Wade's face before flicking back to his cart. "You should read the news."

Wade took the bag of food with an annoyed tsk, but didn't question the guy further. He already looked like he might piss himself if Wade got any closer. Wade shouldn't have threatened him with Bea the last time he tried to skim on the mustard. He headed back to Spidey's apartment to check and see if he was back yet, but when he peaked in the window, he found a startling sight.

Peter's aunt was sitting on his bed, Peter's pillow in her arms, her shoulders violently shaking with her sobs. He could hear her wheezing breaths through the closed window. She looked devastated. Hot fear lit up Wade's insides. He climbed quietly to the roof and pulled up the news on his phone.

  

> _ONE MONTH AFTER THANOS, QUESTIONS REMAIN_
> 
> _One month after the universe was devastated by the death of half of its population, those who remain still struggle to find answers. Sources inside Avengers Tower confirm that Tony Stark and an unnamed alien associate returned from Thanos' home planet late Monday night, but there has still been no official word from our remaining heroes about what comes next._
> 
> _A candlelight vigil was held for New York's own Spider-Man last night in Central Park. Our source confirmed that the hero is dead, along with…_

 

Wade's heart stopped in his chest. When it started back up, it was loud in his ears, so very loud. The article went on to explain what happened, but Wade barely paid attention to what it said. Thanos gathered something called the Infinity Stones and destroyed half of creation for no good god damn reason, and half the population of the planet poofed out into dust. Just like Ximena. And his Petey-Pie was one of the dusted ones, along with the King of Wakanda, Cap's entire entourage, and a whole host of other people. Including, if he could guess, Weasel and Al. If he looked hard enough, he could bet Vanessa was gone, too.

' _Our source confirmed that the hero is dead._ ' It was like a punch straight to his heart. He dropped down on the tar roof with the phone cradled in his hands and tried to breath, but it was like his lungs had been ripped out of his chest. He started rocking to try to keep himself calm, but the fucking words kept repeating over and over.

He didn't know how long he sat on that roof, but it was well passed dark when he stood up again. His shirt collar was soaked through with salty tears, but he barely noticed. Rage was slowly overtaking the grief that had clenched his heart. Rage like nothing he'd ever felt before. It was pure, calming. Simple. He knew what he had to do. _Thanos_.

But first, he was going to have a little talk with the Iron Cunt himself, Tony fucking Stark.

 

* * *

 

 

Wade hadn't visited the Avengers since they moved camp Upstate, but he was as impressed with their security as he had been with the Tower. He didn't even have to scale a 100-story building this time. " _Mr. Stark has revoked your admittance to Avengers Compound, Mr. Wilson. Please vacate the premises immediately, or I will be forced to take evasive measures_ ," JARVIS' smooth English accent informed him as he hoofed it up the five flights to Stark's personal quarters.

"No can do, Jarvie. Tin Man and I have some business to discuss," Wade told him as he rounded the corner on the third stairwell.

" _Mr. Stark does not wish to conduct business with mercenaries at this time._ "

"Don't know if you heard, but my favorite spider met his untimely death thanks to your narcissist asswipe of a boss. He doesn't get a choice." Wade rounded the last corner and stopped at the emergency exit door leading to Stark's hallway to listen for movement. JARVIS was still talking, but Wade tuned him out. He could hear what sounded like a news report, playing louder than even Al set her tv, and nothing else.

He opened the door on a whisper and slipped into the hallway, alert for any movement in the penthouse. The news report was deafening without a steel door separating him from the speakers, a CNN report of what they kept calling 'The Incident'. Wade wanted to eviscerate whichever reporter came up with that stupid name. Slaughter was more like it. Holocaust, even. An incident was two bums fighting over a half-eaten sub in a back alley. This was the extinction of half of all life in the universe.

He sensed the drones before he saw them and rolled out of the way of the first few lasers. Two tiny drones hovered above him, round and small enough to fit in his palm, their lasers wavering as they attempted to zero in on him. After one nicked him in the shoulder, he pulled out a katana and sliced through each in one quick move, barely hearing the tinny thump of the four halves falling to the polished wood floor.

The hallway led him past the ultra modern kitchen—three times larger than any safe house Wade's ever kept and doubtless twice as expensive. "Uppity prick," Wade muttered, slipping his katana back into its sheath as he tiptoed further down the hall. Every step angered him more. The Iron Prick didn't deserve to live in that kind of opulence. He didn't deserve a damp cardboard box on the side of a freeway.

Wade peeked around an open doorway to one of the largest living spaces he'd seen outside of a palace, a huge open area banked with floor-to-ceiling windows. The room was dominated by a massive sectional sofa that curved in a wide arc. It looked like it could seat the entire Avengers team, but at the moment, its only occupant was slumped low on the back, legs sprawled wide, a bottle of booze Wade didn't recognize propped between them. The hero from Wade's nightmares himself, Tony Stark, looking less than fresh in dirty maroon sweats and a hoodie with the Iron Man logo on it, his chin dark with a few weeks' growth of beard. His eyes were trained on the enormous screen across from him, but they were bloodshot and unfocused. He had no reaction when Wade stepped into the doorway.

Wade snarled behind his mask, but when he stepped closer, he made sure to keep his moves casual, nonchalant. Subtle. If Stark got suspicious before he got close, he would suit-up, and then Wade wouldn't be able to hurt him without using a sword, and he didn't want that. Not yet. "Hey there, Tin Man, long time, no see. How are things? Anything interesting happen lately?"

Stark rolled his head in Wade's direction, but his only reaction to seeing Wade was to curl in on himself and groan. He didn't speak.

That was okay. Wade had plenty to say. "I been gone a few weeks. Sounds like I missed some action. It's the funniest thing, I was transporting Colombia's Anne of Green Gables back to the loving arms of her family, content as you please, and then suddenly she just… POOF, right in front of me." Wade reached the couch and pulled Stark up by his hoodie until they were eye-level. "Heard there's a lot of that been going on lately. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" His gloved fingers dug into the rough fabric of the hoodie, the seams straining under his grip.

Stark groaned, but he didn't make a move to get free. This close, he reeked of booze and sour sweat. Wade shoved him back down on the couch with one hand, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Stark bounced against the cushions, amber liquid sloshing everywhere from the bottle he didn't let go of.  "Don't need this," Stark muttered, bringing the bottle to his lips.

Wade ripped it from his hand before he could drink and threw it across the room, ignoring the sound of it shattering on impact. "Focus, Metal Head. I'm talking to you." Wade snapped his fingers in front of Stark's face, but Stark only scowled at him. He kept talking anyway.

"So, the kid wants to be an Avenger, but he's too young, so you tell him no, right?Make him stay in his neighborhood, take care of the petty shit people like you don't care about. Give him that fancy suit with all the tech and an AI to monitor him, but don't give him any training. Don't even tell him what the suit can do."

He grabbed Stark by the hood of his jacket and dragged him off the sofa. This time Stark protested, wriggling and pulling at Wade's wrist to try to free himself, but the movements were too slow and sloppy from drink. Wade dragged him into an open space and stood over his prone body, one boot on either side of his hips. Wade leaned over him, fist still twisted in his hood to lift him off the floor so that their faces were inches apart again.

"What kinda piece of shit mentor were you, huh? Only talk to him when you want to yell at him for fucking up or when you find out he's been teaming up with—what'd you call me? 'Gutter scum'? 'Murdering psychopath'? Deformed freak not even a mother could love'? He didn't like that one, not at all." Wade shook his head, a flash of memory of Peter pacing back and forth on a roof ledge, ranting about how wrong 'Mr. Stark' was and how Mr. Stark didn't have any right to dictate who he hung out with and how did Mr. Stark expect him to learn how to fight if no one ever taught him? It had blown over after a few weeks, and Petey had gone back to talking about getting a Stark internship, but Wade had never seen him run that hot before or after.

The memory made him lash out and punch Stark right in his perfect nose. Stark groaned and tried to curl in on his side to protect his face, but Wade's grip on his hoodie prevented him from twisting too far away. "Fine leaving him with no contact for months, but as soon as he meets another super to help him train and watch his back, you come running to piss in his cereal." Wade punched him again, enjoying the music of his groans as fist met face. Blood trickled down Stark's nose in two thin rivulets.

"But when the biggest of big bads comes strolling into town, you got no problem taking his training wheels off and dragging him into motherfucking space with you to fight the giant purple people eater. And what happens when you do? He. Dies. No body for his aunt to bury. No explanation of what happened. Just gone. And it's. Your. Fucking. Fault." Wade emphasized each word in that last sentence with a punch, each more powerful than the one before, until he was pummeling Stark's smug face in.

He was about to pull out a knife to start cutting up those handsome features when the sound of footsteps down the hall alerted him to the other remaining Avengers heading his way. He managed to get in a three more punches before a stern voice snapped him to attention.'"Wade, stop," it said, and there was no denying that it was Captain America giving the order. Wade pulled his hands off Stark's broken and bloody body and stood up, stowing the knife back in it's sheath without argument. When Cap told you to stop, you stopped.

He looked up to find Cap standing just inside the room with Carol fucking Danvers at his side, both of them stone-faced and unhappy to find the scene before them. Carol was in her super suit, but Cap was in his civvies. He looked like he'd gotten about an hour of sleep in the last week, but his body language was no less authoritarian for it.

Carol took three steps towards him and slammed her fist right into his jaw with the full force of her strength. Pain burst white-hot across his face. When he could open his eyes again, he spied the ragged, bloody remains of his jaw laying on the shiny acrylic floor, a halo of blood surrounding it. It had been a while since a super had hit him with their full strength. If she hadn't literally punched his jaw off, he might let her know how impressed he was with her right-hook. "Are you done?" she said, crossing her arms over the starburst symbol stitched over her chest.

Wade nodded, watching the frayed ends of his mask flop back and forth with the movement.

"Good. Bruce, can you check on Tony?" Cap asked, walking over to them with a brief visual check of Stark. Banner hurried around all three of them with a vaguely horrified look and went to check on the Iron Asshole.

Black Widow appeared a moment later, her gun cocked and a small creature at her side, a gun in it's hand as well. "What's going on? Deadpool? For the love of…" She fell off into cursing in Russian as she holstered her gun and joined them in the middle of the room.

Wade rubbed at his newly formed jaw, trying to massage some of the ache away as he shifted it around to check functionality. "Fuck, I really liked that jaw, Danvers. It was my favorite jaw. Why'd you have to go for the face? Don't you know it's my best feature."

Brief surprise flickered over Danver's face before her mask of indifference fell back into place. "Did you grow a new one already?"

"Healing factor for days, Captain Right Hook." Wade winked at her through the mask, but she just continued her thousand-yard stare.

"What are you doing here, Wade?" Cap asked, a bit of impatience slipping into his voice.

Wade waved his hand at the newscaster on TV, still droning on about the recovery efforts. "Just found out about our latest little 'incident' and thought I'd come to show Metal Head over there my sincerest gratitude for all the work he's done."

"How did you just find out about the Thanos Incident? It happened a month ago. Half the population of the universe died. Were you living under a rock?" asked the small creature that came in with Romanoff.

Wade looked down at it and gasped. "What the shit? Is that a raccoon?!" It earned him a punch to the crotch, but thankfully the raccoon didn't have quite the same strength as Danvers. Wade curled over himself and held his groin to protect it from more damage.

"Rocket has a point. How did you only just find out what happened?" Romanoff asked.

"I wasn't under a rock, but I was stowed away in a storage container full of tomales for a couple of weeks," Wade told her as he straightened back up. Romanoff's hard stare told him that wasn't explanation enough. "I was running an extraction job in the middle of nowhere, Colombia, but my mark went Poof. Like everyone else, apparently, but I didn't know that. Came home and all my friends were gone."

"And you didn't think that was weird? What a sad indictment on your life," the raccoon said.

"Enough," Cap said, effectively shutting the rest of the room up. Even Banner stopped the murmuring he'd been doing to comfort Stark as he tried to get him up. Steve looked like a shadow of his normal self, tired and as close to broken as Captain America probably ever got, but when he turned the full force of his stare on Wade, Wade had no choice but to pay attention. "I realize you're angry, Wade. We all are. But we don't have time for in-fighting. This wasn't Tony's fault. It was Thanos'."

"Yeah, I realize that, Cap, but that douchenozzle gave Spidey a rocket and sent him off into space without a permit, and now he's dead. You don't get to walk away from that, not in my book." Wade pointed a threatening finger in Stark's direction. He was standing now, or rather leaning heavily on Banner's arm, one hand holding a handkerchief to his broken lip to try to stop the bleeding. He tried to glare at Wade, but it must have hurt too much with his swollen eye. Wade blew him a kiss.

Steve ignored the exchange. "Spider-Man wasn't killed for going into space. It would have happened no matter where he was. Just like it happened to Bucky and Sam and Wanda and T'Challa and Stephen Strange and all of Rocket's teammates. We've all lost people we care about. But we aren't going to figure out how to get them back if we're fighting with each other. We need to work together. Can you do that?"

Wade swallowed down the bile that threatened to rise up as he heard the names of the other people lost. He didn't know who the raccoon's people were, but he knew the other names on that list. And he knew Cap would never have let anything happen to Bucky Barnes again if there was any way to stop it. Cap was right. Someone needed to pay, and that someone was Thanos. "Fine. That grape flavored cock goblin is going down. But after that, Tin Can and I are gonna have a talk. With my fist."

Steve's shoulders relaxed, and he nodded his agreement. "Thank you," he said on another tired sigh. The room settled into a quiet, no one knowing quite how to proceed.

"Well, this is awkward," Wade said, whistling and rocking up onto his toes. Danvers gave him a disgusted look and turned on her heel and left the room. Romonoff and the raccoon followed. Steve watched Banner help Stark limp to his quarters before giving Wade a final look and following the other Avengers back to wherever they'd come from. Wade cursed under his breath and follow suit.


	2. Schemes and Plans and Lakeside Chats

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU to 9th_Pawn for letting me buy him Starbucks while he pulled the draft of this chapter apart for me. It was 3000x better for his efforts, friends.
> 
> Giant shocker, I’m already two weeks behind on my proposed posting schedule. Consistent writer I am not, sorry y’all. The re-writes on this chapter were a bitch and a half. I didn’t manage to get them done in time to post the Saturday I intended to, and that posting day happened to also be the first day of [GISH](https://www.gish.com/), which is a week-long scavenger hunt that I participate in every year. Needless to say, I didn’t have time to work on the re-writes from hell during that week. I did manage to make a Spideypool needlepoint version of the Tumblr homepage in that time, though, which you can see below. 
> 
> So, updating the posting schedule. I think we’re going to shoot for once a month. If I happen to get ahead of myself, I’ll post every two weeks, but solidly, we’re going with the second Saturday of the month as a definite.
> 
> Side note, I am also co-modding the [Spideypool Big Bang](https://spideypoolbigbang.tumblr.com/), so if you would like to join us in participating in creating more Spideypool goodness, please do! Information and sign-up forms available in the link above.
> 
>   
>    
> 
> 
> See End Notes for Potential Trigger Warnings

Wade took Stark's seat when he walked into the war room, marked by one of his gaudy maroon hoodies with the Iron Man logo on the back and gold detailing that looked like something Trump would pick out draped across the back of it. He snatched up the nearest tablet and started poking at it, trying to guess the password. The username told him it was Barton's, which meant the password was a joke to guess: IL0veArr0ws. Wade was scrolling through files by the time Banner arrived from tucking Stark into bed, or whatever drunk tank needed to make himself feel better after the beating Wade had shown him. It was amazing how much the Avengers took advantage of Banner's Hippocratic Oath.

Danvers kicked under Wade's knees when she walked past him to re-take her seat next to him, knocking his dirty boots off the fancy touch-screen tablet table where Wade had propped them. "Tony could not have picked a worse time to fall off the wagon. Jesus Christ," she muttered.

"Guess being a self-involved billionaire with a god complex doesn't help you deal when you lose, huh?" Wade asked, not looking up from his scrolling. 

"Why's Deadpool here, again? He's never been useful. Ever," Barton said, directing his question to Cap.

"Aw, are we really gonna talk about my usefulness when you use your super-secure Avengers tech to hide your porn? And not even the interesting kind. Dare Dorm, really, Barton?" Wade said, turning the tablet around to show Barton the folder he'd found nested in Documents titled Super Secret Personal Stuff. Barton turned as purple as his shirt and tried to scramble onto the table to snatch it from him, but Steve pulled him back with an annoyed look at Wade.

"Enough," he said. Wade turned the tablet back around and navigated away from the porn, hearing the chastisement in Cap's voice. Barton was smart enough to shut his mouth. "Wade has interacted with Thanos more than the rest of us combined. If anyone still alive and on Earth has information about his dealings, it's Wade." Wade wanted to preen, but knowing about Thanos wasn't something to be proud of, all things considered.

"How do we know he doesn't work for Thanos, then, if he knows so much about him?" Danvers asked.

Wade burst into uncontrolled laughter, curling in on himself over the tablet in his lap. The thought that he could be... "That motherfucker's the reason I can't die, sister," he finally managed to wheeze out between gasping guffaws. "I'd rather spend the rest of my life wearing Hulk's dirty panties on my head than work for that cock sucker."

"Language," Steve said on a sigh, rubbing his face.

"Sorry, Cap." Wade hopped to his feet momentarily to salute before plopping back in his seat.

"I don't like it," Danvers said. Rhodes echoed her, and a glance around the room had Banner looking wary of him. Only Barton, Romanoff, and the raccoon didn't look fazed by his presence. Wade turned his attention to the raccoon for a minute, still fascinated by it. Him?

"So, you're a raccoon, huh?" he asked, leaning an elbow on his chair arm to look at Rocket, who was sitting in the chair next to him. Rocket glared.

"I'm not a raccoon. I'm a me," Rocket snapped at him.

"Uh huh. But you're shaped like a raccoon, right?"

"And you're shaped like a jackass. What's your point?"

"I've never met a raccoon person before. Your eyes look human. Most raccoons I know got that soulless black-eyed thing going on, but yours are that pretty golden kind. How do you talk? Do you have to get all your clothes tailored or do you just cut a hole in toddler pants?"

Rocket glared at him. "Are you done?"

Wade grinned. Oh, he was going to like this guy. "You furry all over the place?" Wade reached out to poke his arm, but got his hand slapped hard. The little fucker was a lot stronger than he looked. Wade took his hand back.

"Try that again and get your hand back with a nice new hole," Rocket told him.

Wade reached out again just to see if he was bluffing and ended up with a pocket knife stabbed through his palm. It barely even stung. Wade pulled the blade out curiously and brought it up to his face. Shiny titanium with a black handle inlaid with a pattern of arrows and a familiar H symbol. Wade smirked under his mask. "Nice blade," he said. "Looks familiar."

An incredulous squeak popped out of Barton's mouth. "Hey, that's mine."

Rocket ducked a little under the glare Barton was shooting him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Wade handed it back, ignoring Barton. Anyone who stole from that idiot was on Wade's good list. Rocket tried to tuck it back wherever he was hiding it, but another exclamation from Barton had him sliding it over the table with a grumbled half-apology.

Wade pulled the tablet closer again, flexing his free hand to stretch the re-grown muscle tissue, and went back to scrolling. He pulled up the files on Rocket Raccoon and whistled. "Looks like you're in the government experiment club, too, huh? Cap, we got a new member! Logan's gonna love him."

Steve glanced at him with a tired look before continuing whatever conversation they were having about where they thought Thanos was.

"Look, not to be a fork in the works, but does it matter where Thanos is right now? He's the most powerful being in the galaxy with that glove, right? We need to come up with a plan on how we combat that before we even worry about finding him," Rhodey said, spreading his hands out over the surface of the table.

 _He has a point_ , Wade thought to himself. He swiped the file on the raccoon out of the way to go back to searching through the database on Thanos and the Stones while the conversation continued on around him.

"Hey Ranger Rick, you know anything about this lovely lady?" Wade asked a while later, sliding the tablet over to Rocket, who muttered to himself but took the tablet.

"That's Gamora's sister. Psycho bitch, but she can fight. She's tried to kill us a couple of times."

"Thanos' kid, then?" Wade asked.

"Yeah. Why?"

"Billion-dollar Baby said she knew about the Stones, right?" Wade said, switching back to Stark's after-incident report.

"He did," Carol said, turning her whole body to focus on Wade as though she was interested in finding out where he was going with his questions even as her shoulders stiffened in displeasure.

"Might be useful information, dontcha think, Cap? Other Cap?" He turned to her, tilting his head in interest. "Does that get confusing when the two of your work together? Aren't you a Major anyway? Do you outrank Rogers? You should take advantage of that. Major Marvel has a nice ring. I'm partial to alliteration myself."

Carol turned her attention away from him to Rocket. "This woman would be useful. Rocket, do you have any idea where we might find her?" she asked.

"Nebula does her own thing. She's probably trying to find a way to set up a murder reunion with daddy dearest right now," Rocket said. "That's all she ever cares about. And with Gamora—" He cut himself off, a familiar sadness overtaking his pointed face before he shook it off. "With her sister gone, she's gonna be wanting to kill him even more now."

"Where do you think she'd go?" Steve asked.

"I don't fucking know. Probably to find the biggest weapon she can. She'll want to do the killing herself, and she doesn't play well with others."

They kept asking questions, but Wade started tuning them out to go back to looking through the files. He found pictures of the moment Thanos snapped his fingers—aerial surveillance thanks to Wakanda's paranoid security system it looked like to Wade—and what he found surprised him. The snap of Thanos' fingers didn't just destroy half the population of the universe. It crippled him. Wade flipped through picture after picture, zoomed into the tree line. Thanos and Thor were mostly obscured by the trees, but if he zoomed in at just the right angle, he could get a decent view of Thanos' left arm. The glove was crushed, warped and mangled in a way that made it look like it might have been fused with his hand. The skin above it was cracked and bleeding all the way up to the shoulder, and possibly up to his neck, but Wade couldn't find a good enough angle to tell for sure before the coward zapped himself away. He flipped through photos of the after, of Barnes disintegrating, then the warriors of Wakanda on the battlefield, T'Challa—Wade never thought he'd see that level of devastation on Okoye's face. It made him want to send a text to Shuri to check up on the little genius. She probably wasn't handling her brother's death well.

He kept scrolling, kept reading intelligence reports, as the Avengers made plans around him. There wasn't much information available. There was a transcript of an oral report given by Thor that sounded like it was made by an underling chasing him down as he was preparing to leave. He had given the person doing the recording a stilted run-down of his people's encounter with Thanos and what he knew of the Tesseract. According to a note attached to the report, he'd given it right before flying off to find the remains of his people. There were also a few notes on Strange and the Time Stone, but none of it was concrete and none of it from the source. Strange had told Wade more about it himself the last time Wade broke into the Sanctum. With all of the knew and old information swimming in his head, ideas were beginning to emerge, converging, forming into something vaguely resembling a plan.

-

"If you'll excuse me, I need to tinkle. Little boy's room down the hall, right?" Wade said as he stood, his chair making a loud screeching sound as the metal legs drug across the concrete floor. All eyes turned to him, only to fall away the next instant. He knew no one actually cared if he contributed to the conversation, but it still didn't feel great having his suspicions confirmed. He attached Barton's tablet to one of his holsters and left the room.

The bathroom was just where he knew it would be. He slipped inside and into a stall. "This is stupid," he said to himself in a growling, frustrated tone, then frowned at himself.

"What else am I supposed to do? They don't know anything," Wade answered himself as he pulled out one of his guns and dug a full magazine of hollow points out of the pouch strapped to his ankle. He'd been using rubber bullets in deference of Spidey's request that he not kill, but Wade was nothing if not prepared for all eventualities. He switched out the rubber magazine with the real beauties and blew his brains out.

 

Silence.

 

Endless, crushing silence.

 

And then.

 

"It's been ever so long since you came to visit me, my love," the low, seductive voice of her ladyship whispered in his ear.

He opened his eyes to find her standing over him, her deep purple robes hugging her curves in the best ways. Behind her was the dark gray walls of the cave she resided in, the air frigid, but somehow humid at the same time. "Hey, babe, lookin' smokin' as ever," he said as he stood, brushing his suit off.

She slipped into his space before he was fully upright and ran her fingers down his mask. "You needn't hide from me, darling," she told him, sliding the remnants of his mask up and off with a smile warmer than her chilly touch should permit.

Wade wrapped his arms around her and pulled her flush against him for a kiss, her hard bones pressing into his lips with the perfect amount of bite. It really had been too long. "I know I don't have long, but I need your help."

She tilted her head to the side, eye sockets narrowing. "Thanos," was all she said.

"Yeah, you know what he did, right?"

"Of course, darling. I asked him to do it."

"You… what? Why?" he asked, unable to hide the shock from his voice. He didn't hear her reply. He could already feel the pull back to his body, the sharp tug of his soul being ripped from the realm of the dead to that of the living. Death disappeared in a swirl of mist as his vision started shifting. With a shock like a smack to the face, he opened his eyes to find Captain America standing over him, his arms crossed over his broad chest and a disappointed frown on his face to match.

"Why, Wade? You're better than this," he said.

Wade was still reeling from his conversation with his lady love, and it took him a minute to understand what was being asked of him. He sat up, rubbing at the throbbing at the back of his skull. A gunshot to the head was only painless if you didn't wake up afterwards. "Who says?" he asked, still rubbing the bare spot where his mask tore apart with the bullet. He pulled it off to scratch at the new skin, just as bumpy and scared as the rest of him. "Shit," he muttered.

"You snuck off to the latrine to attempt suicide. But you knew that wasn't going to work. Why'd you do it?"

"Half the universe is dead, Cap. I'm a sucker for peer pressure," he lied, not looking up at whatever guilt-inducing expression Cap was wearing.

"Giving up isn't going to save the Universe." Steve paused, his voice softening a fraction, some of his own grief trickling into the next words. "It won't help you save Spider-Man."

Wade was quiet a long time. "Peter. His name was Peter," he said finally, his voice cracking on the name. "He was an eighteen-year-old kid from Queens, new high school graduate and the best person I ever knew, and his name was Peter." He looked up in time to watch Steve's face morph from stern to understanding in under a second.

"I'm so sorry. I had no idea you were that close. Anything you need from me. Anything at all." He held his hand out, and Wade took it and let Cap pull him to his feet.

"I can't team up with toy soldiers. They're never going to trust me. And maybe they shouldn't, but I don't trust them, either."

Steve re-crossed his arms over his chest, a little of his former serious demeanor back even as his eyes remained soft and sad. "I think you'd make a good addition to the team, but if that's really how you feel, I'll respect your choice. But I mean it. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask. Tony and the others might not be able to see passed your past, but I know you're a good man, Wade. I know you'll do what's right."

"Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate the show of support. Coulda used it when I was a kid, but ya know, better now than never." Wade winked before pulling the mask back over his face.

Steve kept staring him down. "Wade."

Wade dropped the teasing act and leaned into Cap's space to kiss him on the cheek. If his heart was a tiny bit larger for having his hero on his side, he would keep that secret for himself. "Thanks, Cap. I'll text you if I need anything. Same goes for you."

"Good luck," Steve said, his voice dipping a bit. He held out his hand for a shake, and Wade took it even though it made him feel weird. No one ever tried to shake his hand.

He glanced down at the mess of blood, bone, and brains at his feet. "There's a uh… a droid that's gonna come clean that up, right?"

Steve covered his face with the hand Wade had just clasped and shook his head again. "Go."

Wade didn't have to be told twice. He paused in the doorway and turned, one hand holding the door open. "I don't know if it matters, but Thanos didn't come up with the plan on his own. Death told him to do it."

Steve's head shot up. "How do you know that?" he asked, taking a step closer, eyes darting all over Wade's mask as if that would give him a clue.

"I asked her." Wade waved a hand towards the mess he left behind and walked away. He didn't have more information than that, but he was damn well going to find the rest.

-

Wade pulled the Iron Audi he'd stolen into fourth gear and steered the car towards a group of trees in the distance, accelerating until the engine whined in protest. He had a conversation to finish with a certain Lady of Death and wasn't interested in wasting time. The car smashed into the tree-line, the sound of metal crunching into an accordion cutting off the scream of glee Wade let out as the steering wheel crushed his chest and he flew forward into the shattered windshield. He felt the glass slice into his throat, cutting off his breath and quickly his spinal cord. His vision blacked out on the site of blood-covered leaves.

Not much about death bothered him by that point, but the quiet. The quiet could be so loud in his head. It made him want to scream until his lungs gave out. He often woke up hoarse, but it never did him any good. When you scream into the void, it doesn't scream back.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on a boat in the middle of a fathomless black lake, crickets chirping in the distance and the soft slosh of water against the sides of the boats filling his ears like a welcoming hello. He looked around to find Death reclined in the back of the boat, her dark robes swirling around her legs in a wind of their own making. She looked gorgeous.

"Hey, so what the fuck do you mean you told Thanos to snap his fingers? I love you, baby, but that was fucking stupid," Wade asked, stomping closer without any care for how it unbalanced the boat and caused it to sway dangerously in the water. Maybe the question came out a little harsh, but seriously. What. The. Fuck.

Death didn't react to the harsh tone, merely waved her hand to the wooden plank in front of her in invitation for Wade to sit. "Simple. There are currently more souls in the living universe than there are within my realm. That cannot stand. I asked him to restore the balance."

"The balance? What balance? How does killing half the universe balance anything?" He crouched down to take a seat on the bench in front of her, but even as he did so, he couldn't feel the wood under his ass. The pull was sharp this time, yanking him back to his body in a swirling mess of river water and bloody trees and birds squawking somewhere high above him.

Wade sat up cursing. It took him longer than he had patience to pry himself out of the car. He checked his pockets, still cursing under his breath as he walked away from the smashed bit of metal, the stupid personalized license plate gleaming at him IM FE MAN. "Fucking shit licker," Wade muttered.

He stumbled off into a distant field, dropping weapons and pouch belts as he walked. He could always get more weapons, but getting another tablet would be too much of a headache, and he might need the information on it later. When he'd walked far enough into the field, he pulled the pin on the grenade he still carried and cradled it to his chest. The explosion sent parts of his suit thirty feet away. He felt the shock as a hole burst into his chest and burned through his heart. He didn't feel the impact of the ground.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on the boat again, further down the bank if the waterline was any indication. Death still sat in the same spot she'd been when he left her half an hour ago. "So, about the killing everyone for balance thing? How does that work again?" He plopped down onto the purple tufted cushion that had taken place of the bench, soft but solid under his ass this time.

Death turned away from him, a frustrated squint to her eye sockets. "As it turns out, it doesn't. When Thanos takes lives with the gauntlet he created, it steals their souls as well. The universe remains unbalanced."

Wade still didn't understand what she meant about the universe being unbalanced. It didn't make any sense that more living souls than dead would be a concern. The universe was expanding, after all. Shouldn't the population expand to fill that space? But still her words had him excited. Wade leaned forward, reaching for her hands to get her attention again. The boat swooshed with the movement. "Where are the souls, then?"

She turned back to him, staring him down with her fathomless, empty eyes. Wade tried to ignore the way his open chest wound fluttered at the feeling looking into them gave him. "Inside the Soul Gem. They fuel it's power. Each soul it takes, it keeps."

Excitement bubbled in Wade's chest. Stolen souls weren't dead and gone forever souls. He leaned further over his knees, but it turned out the bubbling wasn't excitement, it was the feeling of his healing factor doing its work. It pulled him away before his next question could reach her, the sharp, suffocating tug of his soul snapping back to his body making him dizzy.

He opened his eyes, not having realized he'd closed them, gasping and curling into himself to try to ease the pain of regeneration. He could feel each pull of his skin knitting back together over his healed breastbone. He lay in the grass another few minutes to breathe through the pain and try to figure out what to try next.

-

"You are quite determined to see me today, aren't you, dear? If only you'd stay to keep me company. I miss your sweet ass so much," Death told him as he stood up in the middle of a burning field. There were souls drifting across the blackened grass, incorporeal and misshapen. Wade recognized it as the field of the lost, doomed to forever wander without ever finding the path or themselves. He knew Death only came there when she was feeling lost herself, unhappy and unsure of her place in the universe. Being in such melancholy was usually terrible for Wade's depression, but he was still too focused on getting the answers he needed to let the place affect him the way it usually did.

His lady love hovered above him, her robes flowing in their own breeze, the frayed edges just brushing the charred blades of grass. Wade imagined it would smell like smoke if he had a sense of smell in the Underworld.

"Gotta get my fix when I can, you know? I'd stay if I could, you know that, baby," Wade told her. She slipped into his arms before he fully reached out for her, her slim waist so solid in his arms. With his suit destroyed in his latest death attempt, he was able to feel her against the full length of his skin, still raw and painful in a vague way that he knew was going to hurt like a mother when he returned to his body. "But your side piece is to blame for that one," he reminded her, kissing her cheekbone and licking over her teeth.

"What brought you to me this time?" she asked, looking down at him with those eyeless sockets again and making his heart pound.

"Superman'ed it into a wood chipper. I think we got a little more time. Pretty sure they'll be picking bits of me off the yard for months." He nudged his nose under her jaw to kiss a line down her spinal chord.

Death giggled, moving her skull to give him better access. "I like you much more when you're handsy, my love. So much more enjoyable than all those unpleasant questions." She kissed him back, pulling his arms tighter around her. Her hands drifted down to squeeze at his ass, the bones of her fingers digging into the rough skin.

Wade let his own hands wander where they chose, hoping to distract her enough to get the information he needed before she shut him out. The testy way she'd spoken of his previous questions told him the line was already thin. "I thought we were doing such a good job of communicating, though. I'm just trying to get to know your work, baby. Don't you like me curious?"

"Not when the answers are distasteful. I'd much rather you put your mouth to better uses." She tried to kiss him again, but he brushed her teeth away with his nose, nudging against her chin and pressing a kiss there.

"We'll get there, gorgeous, I promise. I'll jump into a volcano and fuck your for days. But first the talkie."

She pulled her teeth inward in her version of a pout, pulling out of his arms and floating away towards the distant mountains. "You try my patience."

"I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry. But I gotta know. The souls in the Stone. Could we get them back?" he asked, following after her. The grass singed his bare ankles, but he barely felt the sparks.

"It's possible," she told him, not turning back to address him directly. "You would need to find a way to defeat Thanos so that you had access to the Stone. But even then, a great sacrifice would need to be made, likely equal to what is to be given in return."

"A soul for a soul?"

"A soul for many souls. It is what Thanos had to give to retrieve the Stone himself."

That made sense. Except. "But I can't sacrifice myself. Thanos made sure of that."

Death turned back to him, the ends of her long purple sleeves fluttering in a breeze Wade couldn't feel. She reached out to set her delicate finger bones against his wrist in a soft touch, winding closer to him again in that magnetic way of hers. "Do you wish to help me retrieve the souls for my realm, lover?"

Wade hesitated. Should he be honest about his goal? She didn't like to be told no. But what could it hurt at this point? "I want to bring them all back to life. Thanos killed everyone I care about besides you. None of them deserved it."

"Death is not about deserving an end. You should know that better than anyone. Who he chose was a matter of chance."

"He took every single person I love that he could. You really think that was chance? You know that asshole hates me."

"And you've never done anything to garner his hatred, have you?" she said, tilting her head with a teasing smile.

"Maybe, but he didn't need to take good people—the best person—to get back at me. It's not right."

She studied him with an unreadable expression, closer to him than he'd realized. "You are far too serious tonight. It isn't attractive." In a fluid motion, she slid back into his arms, her mouth barely brushing his. "You don't have much longer before you must go, my lover. Wouldn't you rather spend our time together in more scintillating conversation?" she purred. "You promised, after all."

He let himself get distracted, sliding his hands down to cup her ample behind and pull her closer. He still had so much to ask her, but he could already feel the ghost of the pull to return to the land of the living already. Might as well make the most of things while he was still with her. He'd be back soon enough to grill her, and for longer if he had anything to do about it.

Her teeth were still tugging at his bottom lip as she faded out of his arms and the sharp, suffocating tug of his soul snapping back into his body took over. He opened his eyes, gasping and curling into himself to try to ease the pain of regeneration. The sound of the wood chipper still dominated the quiet afternoon, loud behind him. The death hadn't lasted nearly as long as he'd have liked. And not he was small, too short to drive a vehicle for at least several more hours as his limbs re-grew. He lay in the grass another few minutes to breathe through the pain and try to figure out what to try next.

-

When Wade jumped into Niagara River, the water was icy cold, not enough to let him die of hypothermia, but enough to shrink his balls to the size of walnuts. He couldn't help the choking squeal that escaped him just before he sank under the turbulent waters. He didn't even attempt to fight the tide. It swept him away towards the Falls at a fast clip, knocking him into boulders without mercy. Even a particularly hard hit to the head wasn't enough to knock him out before the swooping sensation of falling overcame all his other senses. He screamed the whole way down, but the sound of the Falls drowned out his cries of delight. His body hit the rocks below with a thunk he felt down to his bones, his fragile, shattered bones. He barely had time to feel the water fill his lungs before his world went black for the third time that day.

"Hello again, darling. I do love to see you, but I don't see the point in returning to me with such frequency," Death tells him as he opens his eyes. This time, she met him in her bedroom, the harsh stone walls enclosing them on all four sides in high cathedrals of obsidian. Her vast Gothic monstrosity of a bed stood in the middle of the room, black silk sheets peeking out from an onyx comforter and a mountain of fluffy pillows. Death stood over him, the curve of her breasts on display in her tight robe, the front lapels only coming together just under her sternum. She leaned over his prone figure and extended her bony hand to help him stand.

His new limbs still lacked significant muscle mass, making standing an unexpected struggle, but with Death's added strength, he was able to reach his feet.  He might as well have stayed lying down for all the good it did him. He'd only reached half his normal height before he jumped in the Falls, and now faced Death's belly button. "Hey, lookie, I can go to town downtown without having to lean over," he said, burying his nose in the fabric over her pelvic bones.

"You did promise to fuck me for days. You can start now." As she spoke, her body solidified under his touch, flesh expanding out over her bones and cushioning his cheek pressed against her. He spread her robes and found ample hips and the full lips of his favorite labia. He grinned and buried his face in her crotch, tonguing at her clit until she moaned and dug finger bones into the back of his bald head. He played for a long moment, teasing her and getting her just to the edge of orgasm before pulling away.

"I did promise to fuck you, but not until after we finished talking. And now that you know my tongue still works just fine, let's get to it."

Death pushed his face away from her with an unhappy tsking noise. "I thought we'd discussed all there was at your last visit. Unless you are going to give me the souls you retrieve from the Soul Stone, I would much rather spend our time continuing where you just left off."

Wade crossed his arms over his chest, stepping backwards from her so that she wouldn't be able to distract him with her body. "I want you to explain to me why you think the universe is out of balance. I thought having more souls alive than dead would be a good thing. Massive supplies are good, right? More power for you when they pass? I don't get what the problem is."

Death rested her ass against the edge of the bed frame, a pinched pout to her lips. She crossed her arms over her chest to mimic his stance. "The universe requires balance, an equality of life and death, good and evil, light and dark. If one should tip too far towards one or the other, everything could collapse in on itself. Alternative universes colliding, ceasing of life or death completely. More souls are nice in theory, but if there is an imbalance, it effects my power negatively."

"But how? That doesn't make any sense to me."

"Much of what you say makes little sense, darling. I've never faulted you for it. Misunderstanding a concept does not invalidate that concept."

Wade narrows his eyes at her. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've told me a bunch of times that there were more souls in your domain than alive in the universe. You never called that an imbalance."

"It wasn't an imbalance. The universe is not affected if my coffers are full. It is if they are not."

"You sure you're not just being greedy, baby? If I had the chance to get half the cash in the universe, I'd take it before the words left your mouth. This sort of sounds like your trying to steal from the kitty."

Death stared him down for an uncomfortable few moments before straightening and walking away from him. "I tire of this conversation. If you do not intend to fuck me, then our time together is ended. You may spend the remainder of your temporary death seeking your answers elsewhere." She waved him away with a flippant wave of her bony hand.

"Oh baby, don't be like that. You know I always want to be with you. You really don't want me to help you?" He chased after and wrapped his arms around her from behind, surprised to find himself at his full height once more. She must have forced his healing in her annoyance with him. He pulled her back against his chest and licked up the side of her neck. She shifted her head to the side to allow him more room, one hand curling around the back of his neck to encourage him. The hard bone of her fingers dug into his skin in a strange imitation of nails.

"I want you to help me get off, nothing more. Not if you do not intend on giving me the souls you retrieve."

Wade nudged his nose against her throat, letting a hand drift down her abdomen as he bunched up the fabric of her dress until he found the slit that allowed him entrance to her skin beneath again. Cold to the touch, but so smooth against his rough fingers. "Does it really matter if they live a few more decades? You'll have them in the end, won't you? That's how this whole life and death things works, isn't it, gorgeous?"

She made an impatient noise and pushed away from him. "No more talk of this. Fuck me or leave." She pointed at the door, her robes blowing out away from her in an sharp snap of fabric.

Wade slipped back into her person space, immediately dropping his line of questioning. He could recognize when a situation wasn't working for him. "Of course, you're right. How could I ignore how fucking sexy you are in that robe? Look at you, hot like burning, baby." He kissed her hard and picked her up bridal style, and walked her over to the bed. The rest of his visit wasn't exactly a waste, but he got no more answers to his questions.

He woke sometime later on the banks of the river and immediately coughed up the liters of river water forcing itself from his lungs. When he collapsed back onto his back, pain radiating from every healing bone of his body, he found a small crowd standing around him and a woman in an emergency services uniform knelt at his side, staring down at him in shock. "Sir? Are you… how are you alive?" she asked.

Wade grimaced and sat up, trying to get his bearings. He was on the Canadian side of the Falls, if the woman's uniform was anything to go by. People had their camera phones out and were taking flash pictures and video of him. It was hard to see with the constant bright light in his eyes. "What time is it?" he asked.

"Three in the afternoon, sir. You went over the Falls three hours ago." She shook her head, eyes wide as a doll's. "Again, sir, how are you alive? No one's ever survived going over the Falls without any sort of protection. You should be dead."

"If only, lady." He stood, shaking all over like a dog to try to get as much water off him as he could. The woman followed him up, protesting the whole way.

"Please stay seated, sir. The authorities will be here any moment to talk about what happens now that you've survived your fall."

"Yeah, not really interested in having a chat right now, sorry. I'd give you my card, but I don't have pockets right now. Maybe next time?" He indicated his nakedness with a hand gesture before walking away, intending to find the car he'd hot-wired and figure out his next move. He had already decided to give Death a day or two to simmer in her thoughts before trying again. She made it pretty fucking clear that she wasn't interested in his questions.

"You can't just walk back to the border, sir! You're naked! And you don't have your passport. The authorities will need to talk to you, sir." The woman was still trailing him, and with her the crowd of people, all still filming him.

"This lady doesn't give up, does she?" he said to himself. He turned to her with a smile, walking backwards without slowing down. " Sorry, I never carry a wallet with this suit. I'm a citizen, I promise. Maple syrup runs through my veins. I've got Celine Dion's number on speed dial."

He looked around the area, trying to figure out where he was in relation to the border and how he could get back to the truck and the weapons he left inside so they wouldn't get ruined by the water. He was too far south to walk, and swimming was out of the question. "Fuck me, I'm gonna have to deal with the Mounties, aren't I?" he said to no one in particular.

Three wasted hours later, Wade snuck out of the Border Control Office and stole a car to get him to the nearest border bridge. The Border Patrol Officer screamed at him when he jumped the median and ran across the bridge to the American side. He kept running until he found his truck and sped off, ignoring the cops driving after him. Eventually, he lost them in the maze that was the American side of Niagara and he drove back to New York City to make a new plan.

-

Wade opened his eyes after another unsuccessful attempt at getting information out of Death to find a familiar, pointy little face staring down at him. He screeched like a frightened child and flailed around a bit before settling. "Bandito? What the shit are you doing here?"

"Wasting my time, it looks like. Don't you have better things to do than kill yourself?" Rocket asked, glaring at him.

Wade sat up, rubbing at his throat. The battery acid hadn't tasted good going down, and it didn't feel any better coming up. "Not if I want the low-down on the gaudy gauntlet," he croaked. "You know anyone who knows anything about the Stones? Lay them on me."

Rocket crossed his little arms over his little chest and raised one of his furry eyebrows. "Do you?"

"Fuck yeah, I do. A hot little number named Death. Didn't Cap tell you? She and I are close, if you know what I mean." Wade waggled his eyebrows, grinning at the look of disbelief it earned him. Rocket turned away from him and sauntered towards the front door with a disgusted little sound. "Where are you going? Were you thinking about teaming up with me to save the universe? I love a good team-up. I've never had a raccoon partner before. Sounds like fun. Let's do it." He stood up and followed Rocket to the door, blocking it with one hand against the wood three feet above Rocket's head to keep him in the apartment.

Rocket went to open the door, but found it unmovable and glared up at Wade. "I want my friends back. If you're not going to help me, I'll find someone else."

"Who said I wasn't going to help? All your friends went poof with my bestie, Spider-Man, right? I'm gonna get him back if it kills me. And I'm pretty fucking hard to kill. I've tried."

"I saw." Rocket pointed to the ruined floorboards indicating where Wade had coughed up acid during his latest attempt.

Wade waved it off. "Please, that was nothing. I've tried to kill myself in way more interesting ways than that before. I once made Banner so mad he Hulk-smashed me. I blew up my apartment with half a dozen barrels of gas. A few days ago, I jumped over Niagara Falls with just my suit on. The birthday one, not my hot little red number."

"And none of that killed you, huh?"

"Not permanently. Got laid five times, though."

"Because that's what's important right now. Look, asshole, I came looking for you because the Avengers are more concerned with getting their friend sober and healed up after you put the wale on him than they are figuring out how to fix this shit. I don't know how you people do things on Earth, but I need a plan. If you're too busy getting laid, I'll find another way."

Wade leaned his shoulder against the door and crossed his feet at the ankles, keeping most of his weight against the door so the little guy couldn't move it. He got a giant laser blaster pointed at his crotch for his efforts. Wade flung his hands up in defense. "I can't help that Her Ladyship wants all up on my hot bod. It's hard work getting a straight answer out of her. She's the one that called the hit on the universe, and she doesn't like admitting that she fucked up. You try telling an all-powerful being that she's wrong and find out how quickly she stops talking to you."

"So you're sleeping with her instead? How is that helpful again?" The blaster wasn't lowered. Wade's fingers itched to rip it out of Rocket's hands and get a better look at it. It looked like it could put a hole right through him and his front door.

"I know the souls of the people who were destroyed are trapped inside the Soul Stone and that we'll need to sacrifice something of equal value to free them. I know Thanos is on his home planet, congratulating himself on how great he is. I'm working on getting Death to help me reverse what he did at the moment, but like I said, she's a hard egg to crack when she doesn't want to admit she's wrong."

The blaster lowered, but wasn't holstered again. "So they aren't dead?"

"Nope, not all the way dead. Just mostly dead. We need to find our Miracle Max and save them."

"Miracle who?"

"They don't have the Princess Bride wherever you're from? Now that's a tragedy." Wade checked the Adventure Time watch Peter gave him for his One Year without Un-Aliving Anyone Anniversary. "We've got a couple hours before she'll be open to talking to me again. Let's rectify this tragic twist of fate." He moved away from the door and over to his tv to pull up his streaming services.

Rocket swung the blaster around, waving his tiny arms emphatically. "Buddy, I don't know what you're talking about, but whatever it is, we definitely got more important things to do right now. If Death ain't giving you the information we need, let's go find Nebula. She's about as hard to crack, but I think I can talk her into helping us if it means she gets to kill daddy."

Wade turned away from the tv, Playstation controller in hand. "Any suggestions on how we find her? SHIELD files said she's a cybernetic  interstellar assassin. Badass job description, but not exactly easy to track down."

Rocket pulled out a SHIELD tablet of his own, smirking. "I got a couple ideas."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wade kills himself MULTIPLE times in this chapter, in a mix of graphic and non-graphic ways. If that bothers you, please don't read (although what are you doing reading Deadpool-centric things at all, friend? That's kind of his _thing_ ). 
> 
> Also, Wade eats out Death. It's a tiny bit graphic. Also, his body is child-sized while he does so. He isn't a child by any means, his body is just regenerating from jumping head-first into a wood chipper. It happens.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you want writing updates from me, you can follow me on Twitter [@RonsPigwidgeon](https://twitter.com/RonsPigwidgeon) or Tumblr at [MsCaptainWinchester](https://mscaptainwinchester.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> And if you'd like to come yell about Spideypool with me, join the 18+ Discord server I co-mod, [Isn't It Bromantic](https://discord.gg/cfZEbNv)!


	3. In Which Wade Does Some Sun Bathing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I'm going to set a tentative posting schedule of every two weeks._ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA  
>  I'm a fucking mess, y'all. Thank you for your patience. I wrote this chapter, and then jumped on the mod team for the Spideypool Big Bang and started writing my own fic for it, and this just... fell from my consciousness. Oops!
> 
> Side Note: I had no idea of that they were planning to make a PG13 cut of Deadpool 2 at the time I wrote this chapter (as evidenced by the fact that the first chapter includes Wade loving the Princess Bride as well, and that was posted in August), let alone that they were going to give it a Princess Bride theme. This was pure happy coincidence, I promise.

Wade slammed his fist against the hard wood of the front door, the reverberations shooting pain through his wrist bones and down his arm. He had been knocking for a full five minutes already with no answer. "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE, DUMBLEDORE. ANSWER THE DOOR! WE HAVE A UNIVERSE TO SAVE AND NOT A LOT OF PATIENCE," he called through the door. No answer.

"Fuck this," Rocket muttered, pulling his blaster out and shooting a spray of laser blasts at the door. They hit an invisible barrier and melted into the wood like butter sliding over warm bread, leaving the wood unmarked. "What the shit?!"

"Magic," Wade reminded him. He pounded on the door again. "WONG, GET YOUR MYSTICAL ASS OUT HERE. I DON'T HAVE A DEMON QUEEN EX-WIFE IN THIS UNIVERSE. YOU'RE OUR ONLY HOPE."

"I'LL BLOW THE BUILDING UP IF YOU DON'T OPEN THE DOOR, WIZARD," Rocket yelled, pulling the larger gun off of his back and hefting it. Wade tried to take it from him on their cab ride over, but he got a knife in the thigh for his efforts. It must have been as impressive to Wong as it was to Wade, because the door opened to a pinched-faced man with a goatee.

"What do you want?" he asked, shoulders slumping in resignation.

Wade pushed right passed him into the front hall. Rocket followed after him, smacking Wong in the knees with his gun before strapping it back onto his back. "Glad to see you're doing your part to save the universe here, Wong-Wong," Wade said as he looked around at the rich mahogany and too many oriental rugs—was it still PC to call them oriental? Wade didn't know. He stepped onto one and couldn't help but notice how plush they were. Bastards. What was with snooty old houses and fancy rugs? Did Strange and Professor X share a decorator?

"I am doing my duty in guarding the Sanctum. It is not my place to attempt to retrieve the souls," Wong said, closing the door slowly, as if he was hoping if he hesitated long enough, they would decide to leave him alone.

"That's nice. We need you to tell us what you know about the Infinity Stones, and then we need you to help us find someone else so she can tell us what she knows about the Infinity Stones."

Wong stared from Rocket to Wade and back again. "Why do you want to know about the Infinity Stones? They're already in Thanos' possession. The deed has been done. It cannot be undone."

"Optimistic, as always, Wongy." Wade winked through his mask. Wong made no reaction. "We might not be able to turn back time this time, but I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to crack the stones if we really believe in ourselves and clap out hands three times." Wong raised an eyebrow. Of course a boring ass monk wouldn't understand a Peter Pan reference. Philistine. "Death told me those souls are just hanging out in the Soul Stone. There's gotta be a ritual or something we can do to spring all of them, right?" he asked, turning to poke at a statue of a three concentric circles resting on a side table. It collapsed under the weight of his finger. He didn't attempt to pick the pieces back up.

He did raise one to his mask to get a better look at it, but Wong snatched it out of his hand and did a combination of hand gestures that made his hands glow as the statue came back together. "Leave that alone," Wong chastised him. "There isn't a ritual for releasing souls from the Stone as far as I'm aware. The majority of my knowledge is of the Time Stone, but I believe much like the Time Stone, you must be the master of the Soul Stone in order to wield its power."

"So we need to tug it out of Thanos' cold, dead hand, then?"

"Yes."

"And if we manage to do that, you don't know how it works from there?"

"I have theories, but no practical knowledge. The Masters of the Mystic Arts have never held dominion over the Soul Stone. Until Thanos retrieved it, it was believed to be lost to the cosmos."

"So you can't help us, then?" Rocket asked.

"I'm afraid I cannot. You are welcome to peruse our library, but the majority of our collection relates to the mystic arts and time theory. I don't know how helpful it would be to your cause."

"Our cause," Wade echoed, pulling open a drawer of the table nearest him and poking through what looked like old, unpaid bills and a mess of street fliers. For all his fancy talk, Wade liked knowing Strange had a bit of a hoarder side to him. Wong pushed the drawer closed with an annoyed look. Wade moved onto the next drawer. "Wouldn't that be your cause, too? Strange got dusted too, didn't he?" he asked.

"Stephen had the ability to view all outcomes of an altercation with Thanos. If he chose a path that resulted in his death, he did so for a reason. I have faith that whatever is to come is what is best for the Time Stone, as well as the universe." He said this in such a calm voice that Wade almost believed him, but there was panic behind his eyes and a deep, empty sort of sadness that Wade had only recently become used to seeing in everyone around him, though he'd been viewing it in the mirror for decades. It made his stomach turn over and threaten revolt.

"Well isn't that comforting. All our friends are dead, but at least there was a reason for it. We don't know what that reason is, but at least there fucking is one," Rocket said, muttering to himself as he paced away from them and started ranting about arrogant humans with egos larger than their cocks.

"So you aren't going to help us?" Wade asked, shutting of the drawer full of plastic utensils and soy sauce packets with a forceful shove.

Wong frowned at the noise. "It doesn't sound like I have anything to help you with. I don't have the information you're looking for."

"You can find us the person that does, though, right?" Rocket asked.

Wong paused, his mouth pinched in thought. "Possibly. Who are you looking for?"

"A chick named Nebula. She's Thanos' daughter, but she wants to kill the asshole as much as we do."

Wong frowned down at Rocket. "Do you have anything of hers I could use to narrow the search? Is she a blood relative of Thanos?"

"Her file said she was adopted," Wade told him.

"I think I have something of hers. Hang on." Rocket started opening flaps on his utility belt, pulling out random objects and putting them back when they weren't what he was looking for. Eventually, he pulled out a strange-looking knife with a hooked blade the size of Rocket's forearm and held it out to Wong. "I stole this off her a few years ago, back when she was still Daddy's little puppet."

Wong took the knife, cautious with the handle, and walked away from them down the long hallway leading further into the building. Wade and Rocket followed him. "She let you steal a knife off her?" Wade asked out of the side of his mouth. Nebula's file had been fuzzy on some of the details, but her list of intergalactic murders and assassinations was extensive in a way that had Wade salivating.

"Sticky fingers, my friend. Sticky fingers." Rocket wiggled his fingers at Wade as if to demonstrate. "I got hands a Veruvian Sleetherder would sell their soul for."

"That sounds like something the author made up."

"The who?" Rocket eyed him as they approached a tall doorway.

"Nevermind," Wade muttered.

Wong led them into a large atrium-looking room with a domed ceiling extending up several floors. Light was coming in from all directions, and yet the room still felt small and dark. The air tasted of sadness and despair. Wade wanted to run away before the depression overtook him, because he could feel it as soon as he stepped inside. He distracted himself by walking to the nearest shelf and promptly touching everything on it.

Wong lay the knife on a table and began moving his hands over it in a weird version of interpretive dance that made Wade dizzy, but was apparently doing magic because his hands began glowing with bright blue bands of symbols and lines. "Put that down," Wong said without looking up as Wade picked up an ancient-looking helmet and tried to put it on his head. Wade ignored him.

The second the helmet touched the fabric of his mask, an electric shock went through him that was so strong, it flung him across the room. He ended up slumped in a corner on his ass with the helmet upended between his splayed legs. "What the fuck?"

Rocket was bent in half, cackling and pointing at him. "I told you to put it down," Wong said, looking up for the first time since entering the room. He had a smug little smile on his face to match the laughter behind him.

"You didn't say it would zap me. What was that?" Wade stood up, brushing himself off and giving the helmet a wide berth as he stepped away from it.

"The Helmet of Hyujeong. It rebels against being used by invaders." Wong walked over and picked the helmet up and carefully placed it back on it's stand with a sharp look over his shoulder at Wade. "The person you're looking for is on Nidavellir."

Rocket started cursing loudly, at least Wade assumed that was what was happening. He only recognized every third word. "Is that bad?" he asked.

"Unless you have an interstellar ship, yeah, that's bad. Nidavellir's on the other side of the galaxy from here, and I'm pretty sure you Earthlings don't have the kind of tech we'd need to get there," Rocket told him.

Wade didn't know how to respond to that. He wasn't wrong. Carol's ship would only be for outer orbit travel, and the Quinjets definitely didn't have that kind of range.

But maybe they didn't need a ship. Wade turned to Wong, who tensed as soon as Wade's mask eyes focused on him. "What?" Wong asked.

"You found Nebula on Needa Venereal Disease or wherever, right? So you know where it is?"

Wong took a step back as if distance would stop Wade from focusing on him. "I was able to locate it, yes."

"Could you do one of your portal thingys there for us?"

"Would it get you out of my sanctum?"

"It absolutely would."

Wong was already moving his arms before Wade finished talking. It took him a moment longer than it had the last time he made a portal for Wade, but within moments, there was a giant orange circle as tall as Wade in the middle of the room. On the other side was the kind of fathomless darkness that could only be space. Wade ran straight for it and jumped through like he was about to win the gold medal for sprint vaulting. The portal closed behind him when Rocket walked through it behind him, and they were left in the dark.

-

"Where the fuck are we?" Wade stage-whispered to Rocket, trying to find a source of light in the pitch black. He pulled a flashlight out of a back pouch and flicked it on, but the light didn't go far enough ahead of him to give any answers.

"Smells like a storage room. Door's over here," Rocket told him, accompanied by the sounds of little footsteps. Wade turned the flashlight towards him only to get an annoyed look back. "Krutack, trying to fucking blind me? Get that thing away from me and get over here. We don't have time to waste."

Wade lowered the flashlight to the ground to light his way and followed Rocket to a large metal door, much taller than even Wade. Wade could barely reach the doorknob. He glanced down at Rocket, but he didn't look surprised at the height of it. He jumped onto a few storage boxes and climbed up until he could reach the doorknob and turned it until the door swung open, dragging him along with it. Wade stepped out of the way, watching the show with a knot of confusion. Were they in the land of giants?

"Are we going to have to climb a beanstalk?" Wade asked.

"What are you talking about now? I swear, between you and Quill, you Earthlings have the weirdest references. This is the sleeping quarters, I think. We weren't here long enough to sleep before."

"You've been here already?"

"I was just here with Thor. How do you think he got his shiny new ax?"

"You know Thor? He's so handsome, isn't he? We fought a demon polar bear together once. It was so badass. He's so handsome. I want to have his little godlings," Wade said with a wistful sigh. "Didn't know he had a new ax. Is it as sexy as he is?"

Rocket cut him off with an arm smacking into his thighs. "Shut up, would you? I hear voices."

Wade couldn't hear anything, but he also didn't have the hearing of a raccoon. "But our godlings would be so cute. His strength and beauty and my quick wit and indestructibility. They'd be unstoppable," he whispered, dropping into sneak mode behind Rocket and creeping closer to what must be the voices Rocket's hearing.

"You should never reproduce," Rocket whispered back to him. "I can help you out with that." He pulled his blaster and aimed it at Wade's crotch. Wade dropped his hands to cover little Wade with a squeak of protest. Rocket smirked and went back to the task at hand.

As they drew closer to a tall set of doors, Wade started hearing the voices through the crack between them, too. "Why not? I've been fighting my father for years. If anyone should kill him, it's me."

"A great deal of power is needed to yield the Stones. Far more power than you are capable of wielding, little one."

"I know my own limits, dwarf. Make the gauntlet, and I'll worry about whether or not I can yield it."

"Hey buddy, if you're gonna make another gauntlet, maybe don't give it to the blue chic? The author says it doesn't end well if you let her have it," Wade said as he popped out of from behind the pillar he'd been hiding behind to eavesdrop. A dagger flew at his face in the next second, but he snatched it out of the air before it could hit him. "Impressive," he said, examining the craftsmanship of the dagger. Definitely not made from Earth materials. He balanced it on a fingertip and watched it barely tilt. "I'm keeping this," he said, tucking it into a strap on his thigh.

"Who are you?" the woman snarled, stalking closer to him with deadly grace as she unsheathed two daggers from her back.

"Deadpool, at your service. You must be Nebula. Read a lot about you. Impressive resume. Your kill count's almost as high as mine. I think you know my associate." He dodged an attack to his right, but was almost too slow to dodge her second attack on his left side. She was fast, much faster than his usual opponents, and the fact that he wasn't trying to kill her had him at a disadvantage. He had to result to pulling out the girls to block her knives.

"Retract the claws, crazy. Deadpool's a friend," Rocket yelled, shooting at her with a gun Wade hadn't seen him use yet. Whatever it was shooting—some kind of electric bullet, it looked like—Nebula deflected it with one dagger while attempting to stab Wade in the neck with the other.

"We. Aren't. Friends," she said through gritted teeth, just as she managed to stab a blade into Wade's lower back, right into a kidney.

Wade braced himself against the pain and snapped around to elbow her in the face. She knocked back a foot, but recovered quickly. Wade pulled the dagger out of his back and flung it to the side. "It takes a lot more than that to kill me, Robocop," he told her, dodging a kick to the face and grabbing onto her ankle to flip her. She landed on one knee and used the momentum to swipe at his ankles, knocking him over long enough to get on top of him. He recovered in time to block her attempt at stabbing him in the throat again, but she was strong. Spidey strong.

"You don't skimp on arm day, do you? Fucking fuck, you're strong. If I wasn't so worried you'd cut my nuts off, I'd be so turned on right now."

She kneed him in the groin for the comment and yanked her wrist out of his grip and managed to stab him in the shoulder. Wade barely flinched, even as he heard the tip of the dagger scrape against the stone floor underneath him. His shoulder muscles were already knitting together as she pulled the blade out. He rolled her onto her back and wrestled her dagger arm over her head.

"This no un-aliving  people kick Spidey's has me on is really helping my defensive maneuvers, don't you think? Are you even trying over there? I thought you were some kind of badass cyborg?" He spoke too soon because she used the time he was talking to steal a gun from one of his holsters and shoot him in the stomach. Even rubber bullets can wound if shot from point blank range. Wade curled in on himself for a moment, yelling a curse.

She shoved him onto his back and kicked him in the stomach, aiming for the gunshot wound. He curled in further, but didn't let the pain distract him from grabbing her foot on the next kick and flipping her back onto her back. "Haven't had this much exercise in a while. I like it. You need a sparring partner? We'll have to exchange numbers," he said as he held his katana to her throat.

"Do you ever stop talking?" she growled, gripping the blade with her metal arm and pushing it away from her, her muscles shaking with the strain.

Wade let her go, not actually wanting to kill her, and stood up. "I'm the Merc with the Mouth. If I stopped talking, I wouldn't be living up to my moniker, and we can't have that, now can we?" He reached down to help her stand, but she only used the hand to flip him around so that his arm was behind his back and shoved one of her blades right between two ribs.

He coughed loudly, feeling like he might collapse, but he managed to stay upright and leaning back against her as she twisted the knife deep in his pectoral muscle. She'd missed his heart by half a centimeter, he could tell. He turned his head to the side, smiling up at her through the mask before kissing her cheek, earning the extra stab wound that gave him time to slip out of her grip, her dagger still lodged in his chest. He pulled it out and threw it skittering across the stone floor near— "HOLY SHIT, it's a giant!" he shouted, stepping back a foot as he looked up—and up and up and up—to the man standing near the massive forge. He was easily three times Wade's height, dressed in blacksmith's clothes, with a long, dirty beard and scraggly hair to match.

"That's Eitri, you idiot. He made Thor's new ax," Rocket told him.

Nebula attempted to stab Wade while he was distracted, but he was aware enough of her movement to snatch her wrist before she could make contact again and twist her wrist enough to force her to drop the knife. "That's awesome. I totally want to talk to you after this, Mr. Dwarf. I have so many questions for you," he told the dwarf, who looked no more interested than he did before Wade butted his head into the conversation between the dwarf and the cyborg. "Speaking of, could we maybe talk for a minute there before you keep trying to kill me, Nebula? We traveled literal light years to come talk to you. You're being very rude right now."

"I'll show you rude," Nebula said, pulling out a baton from Wade couldn't tell where and wielding it threateningly at him.

Wade held his hands up to try to surrender. "Look, we could keep sparring all day. Hot people trying to kill me is totally one of my turn-ons. But we're kind of on a mission, and I'd like to get back to it. We just have a few questions about your dad."

Rocket stepped in front of Wade, holding his tiny hands up in a mirror of Wade. Nebula sucked in great lungfuls of air while staring them both down with the kind of look that would make a gorgon afraid. "He's right. Annoying as fuck, but right. We're here for the same reason as you are. You want to kill daddy dearest? So do we."

Nebula said nothing, but her cold glare turned on Rocket, some of the menace trickling away with it as she assessed him for authenticity.

Wade kept his hands nice and high, nodding along with Rocket. "What he said. Your dad's been a pain in my ass for a couple of decades, and that was __before__  he killed everyone I've ever loved. Hell, he's the reason you couldn't kill me just now. Asshole won't even give me that dignity."

Nebula turned her glare back on Wade, most of the heat gone now that she'd let them speak. "What do you want with me?"

Wade explained their search for information about the Stones and what could be done to reverse their effects. He told her about his conversations with Death and what her role in the situation had been.

Nebula sheathed her weapons, giving Wade a considering look. "Deadpool, is it? I've heard my father talk of you before. He said you stole the love of his life from him."

"I did not! She wasn't interested in his giant, purple creeper ass. She's a lady of discerning taste. He just wanted her to be as in love with him as he thought he was with her."

"My father is not capable of love."

"Don't I know it."

Nebula turned to look up at the giant dwarf, a question on her face. The dwarf sat on the edge of a stone ledge, the ground shaking as he did so. Wade grabbed onto the nearest pillar for stability. "He appears to have information about how the Stone works that could be useful," he said. His voice was loud and deep, sinking into Wade's bones in a way only someone like Galactus ever had. Now that Wade could pay attention to his appearance, he noticed that the man had two metal fists where his hands should be. They didn't look mobile. Had that happened before or after he made the ax for Thor?

Nebula began picking at her nail without looking at them. "The dwarf is looking for a way to create a device that can harness the power of the Stones in order to release the souls from the Soul Stone, but he only has information on how the Stone traps the souls, not how they can be released."

"Are you saying you don't know? That's the whole reason we came looking for you," Rocket said. "Great, now we're stuck here with no way to get somewhere useful, and we don't even have the information we need."

Wade turned around in a circle, cursing under his breath. "Am I gonna hafta kill myself again? Motherfucker, the headache from last time just went away."

"Excuse me?" Eitri said, leaning down closer to them. "Did you just ask if you should kill yourself? Again?"

"How else am I going to get Death to give us the info we need?" Wade asked.

"Death?" Eitri asked.

"The love he and my father share," Nebula informed him, her arms crossed over her chest, one finger tapping against her elbow. The look she was giving Wade could have liquefied a lesser mortal.

"She's also the one who put the hit out on half the universe. Betcha didn't know that, huh?" Wade told her, smirking at the way her eyes widened.

"What are you talking about? My father's been talking about this plan since Gamora and I were children. His campaign is how each of us found ourselves in his household."

"What? He ax your home worlds?" Wade asked, knowing it would get a rise out of her before the words left his mouth.

Nebula straightened, fingers giving off a faint clicking sound as the joints snapped together to form a shiny metal fist at her side. "That is none of your business. How could he have waited so long to get the Stones, if this has been his end goal for possibly decades?"

Wade shrugged. "Probably didn't know how to get them. Or maybe he didn't have a way to make them work together." Nebula's eye twitched as Wade spoke. Wade tucked that in his back pocket to ask about later. He turned his gaze on the dwarf instead, then the large sample gauntlet that stood upright on a bench nearby. From the pictures he was able to find, it was a scale replica of the original made of a much darker metal. A prototype, probably.

"When he demanded I make the gauntlet, he told me he had been searching for decades for a way to harness the power of the Stones. I do not imagine he was lying."

"I cannot believe this all stems back from his mistress. This is so outrageously stupid. I've never understood my father's obsession with that woman, and to put so much effort into winning her favor. To cause so much destruction…" Nebula threw her hands up and started stalking around the room to pick up her daggers and clean them on a cloth she found on a table.

Wade shrugged. "You never been between the legs of a woman with that kind of power. It's a hell of a drug," Wade told her.

She scowled at him. "Don't be crude."

"Sorry, girlie, I don't have another setting."

Nebula cleared her throat in a loud, obvious way, turning her attention to Eitri. "We have more important matters to discuss. I need you to find a way to extract a soul from the Soul Realm. If you won't make a gauntlet, find another way."

"I'm beyond creating new items, thanks to your father." He held up the metal fists in demonstration. It updated the timeline for Wade, but not enough to know if he made the ax before or after the gauntlet. He would have to ask Rocket later. "As much as I would enjoy defeating him, I am at a disadvantage. Even were I to have use of my hands, I would still need more information to understand what needs to be made."

"Could you make a new gauntlet just like the one you made for Thanos? If you had help?" Wade asked. He was forming an idea. A bad one that was definitely going to get him killed, maybe even permanently, but if it meant Spidey and all the other good people who were killed for a stupid idea got to live, he could take those consequences.

"Yes. But as I already told Nebula, it would be useless without someone powerful enough to yield it, and none of you are."

"We can worry about that later. Let's just make the thing. We can figure out how to get the Stones from Thanos and kill him later."

Eitri looked as if he might protest, but for once, Wade wasn't in the mood for more talking. "What else are you going to do? It's not like you have a gaming system around here. All your friends are dead, right? Mine, too. Let's do something about it."

"As you wish."

"Aw, Mr. Dwarf Giant, we just met, but I love you, too," Wade cooed. The rest of the room stared at him as if he'd grown a third head. "Has no one seen the Princess Bride? Inconceivable…"

-

Rocket wandered off to find the forge's armory, on a mission to find "the most badass weapon I can", leaving Wade to act as assistant to the amputee blacksmith while Nebula sharpened her blades and judged them from a seat far to the side. Not much of a talker, that one, but Wade liked the look of her knife collection.

"So if you're going to make a new gauntlet, someone's gotta open up the thing in front of the star?" Wade asked, looking out at the dying neutron star at the heart of the forge. It caught his breath, reminding him that even at the end of all things, beauty still existed in the universe. He pulled his phone out and took a picture. If he managed to find a way to reverse all this, he'd want to show it to Peter.

"The iris, yes. The mechanism is broken, and without my hands, I cannot fix it."

"And last time Thor held it open?"

"Yes, and it nearly killed him. I don't imagine you could fare better, human." Eitri dropped more rough gold-colored metal into a cauldron. The mold of the gauntlet was already situated below it. There were symbols and intricate patterns carved into the sides that Etiri had explained would imbue the gauntlet with the magic needed to wield it when the time came.

"Is that supposed to be a threat? I'm basically immortal."

"So is Thor. The full force of a star isn't something even gods can undertake easily."

"If I can keep it open long enough to heat the metal you need, that's all that matters. I've come back from worse things," he lied. He had no idea what the limits of his regeneration were, but he had a feeling the power of the sun might be too much for it. "Look on the bright side, at least this will probably give me plenty of time to win over Death and maybe get her to help us. I know she knows how the Soul Stone works. The little minx just doesn't want to tell me. I gotta get her on board with all those people getting returned to the land of the living."

"And you're going to use the power of your dick to do that?" Nebula asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Don't knock it 'til you've try it, sweetheart. It's a pretty nice dick."

"I could cut it off for you, if you'd like me to see it so badly." She flashed a thin blade at him, gleaming in the light from her polishing. Wade lifted his mask up far enough to stick his tongue out at her. She gave Eitri a flat look. "Are you sure you want to work with this child?"

"To me, you are all children," Eitri reminded her as he climbed back down from depositing the final bars into the cauldron. "If you truly wish to sacrifice yourself for this cause, now is the time, Mr. Deadpool."

"Pool's fine. Where's Rocket's little ship?" Wade looked around and spotted the little world-hopper parked at the far end of the bay. He dropped his weapons in a pile at his feet, pointing at Nebula as he dropped Bea on top of Arthur. "You leave these gorgeous ladies alone, hear me? I come back and one of them is touched, and you're gonna feel it, comprende?"

Nebula rolled her eyes again. "Go die, would you?"

"Gladly." Wade showed her his middle finger as he skipped away towards the ship. He didn't let the weight of what he was doing hit him until he'd sat down in the pod and closed the glass. His stomach turned to ice and sunk low in his belly and a cold sweat broke out across his brow. There was a real chance that this was it, his final ending. For all his talk, the chance of him really being able to survive the force of a star was… not good odds. "I wouldn't take that to Vegas," he muttered. He pulled the seatbelt over his chest and buckled it with a final click that was too loud in his ears. The instruments inside turned on.

It wasn't a difficult rig to work with, but his hands shook as he took the joystick in his palm. His whole body was shaking with cold sweats by the time he'd guided the ship off the ring of the forge and towards the center of the dying star. He could feel the glow of heat well before he approached the mechanism. He quickly began to sweat for another reason. He parked the pod a few feet away from the entrance and fumbled around for a breathing mechanism. It would do them no good if Wade died of oxygen deprivation before he managed to get the iris open.

He found a helmet and popped it on his head, the lip of the helmet sealing against the leather of his suit. It probably wouldn't be enough to prevent him from hypothermia, but he likely wouldn't have to worry about that with the heat of the star burning the leather from his skin, and his skin from his bones. He tried to push the thought aside, but he had to try three times before his fingers would work well enough to open the glass hatch of the pod. He pushed a button to send the pod back to the forge deck and jumped to the ledge of the eye as it began its return journey. If he knew nothing else about this process, he knew that he was not going to be needing a ride back.

It was a good thing Wade had never been afraid of heights because there was only a four-foot ledge between him and eternity. He was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack just thinking about falling from that ledge. But he couldn't think about that. He had a job to do.

He examined the mechanism that he was going to have to open. Eitri had told him there were handles he was going to have to pull together to open the iris. He reached out to touch one, testing. It moved. __No more stalling. Just do it, you pansy,__  a voice in the back of his head chided him. He took a deep breath and grabbed a hold of each handle and pulled them down.

The iris opened, and with it exactly what Eitri had promised. The full force of a dying star, straight at his chest. He had to clench his teeth to help him brace against the impact of it. His strength was failing him, but there was no way he was going to come this far to lose. He clung on for as long as he could, the pain worse than anything he had ever experienced before. He could feel his molecules separating, could feel the skin peeling off his muscles and bones, the leather of his suit melting into that skin at an excruciating rate. His lungs stopped working, his blood stopped pumping. The last thought he had was of Peter's beautiful face, smiling at him with a churro in his hand as he snapped a comeback at him.

And then the world went black.


	4. Baby Play, the Asgardian Way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay in posting a new chapter. Spideypool Big Bang is over for the season, and Avengers: Engdame is coming out in a month, so it's time to get this show on the road.

When Eitri smashed the two halves of the mold apart with his metal fists, the object that came tumbling out wasn’t like the original, not entirely. Where Thanos’ gauntlet was a gleaming gold that shone so bright it could be difficult to look at, the gauntlet that fell to the forge floor was as black as the far reaches of space, endless and mesmerizing. He scooped it up in his two prosthetics and took it over to a table to cool.

Nebula joined him at the table, their eyes fixed on the fathomless, matte black. “Why is it black?” Rocket asked after long minutes of silence, emerging from the hallway that led to the armory. He hopped up onto a crate to get a look at the thing, his head tilted in confusion. He was holding a sword Eitri’s brother Einir had forged for the Elf Queen of Lysantia, Vilaria. It flashed a beam of light onto the gauntlet, but instead of reflecting back, it sunk into the matte finish and disappeared.

“I… don’t know,” Eitri answered, cocking his head to the side with a frown. He and Rocket exchanged a look. This couldn’t mean good things. Did he cast the metal incorrectly? Had the mold been damaged somehow? Did the idiot human jumping into the forge disturb the process?

“If that idiot ruined the gauntlet, this was all for nothing,” Nebula growled, stalking away from them with an angry flick of one of her blades.

“How do we know if it works or not?” Rocket asked Eitri.

“I don’t know. Without one of the Stones to test the gauntlet’s power, there’s no way to know if it can wield them, should you manage to take them from Thanos.”

Rocket looked from the gauntlet to the heart of the forge, heat waves emanating from the metal casing, but the eye once more closed. “How’d you get the thing open again? Thor had to do it himself last time.”

“The red clown covered in knives opened it. I told him he would not survive the process, but he didn’t listen,” Eitri explained.

Rocket looked from the gauntlet to the forge and back again, disbelieving his ears. “It almost killed Thor, and he’s a god. There’s no way that idiot survived long enough to heat the metal up.”

“He did. I was as amazed as you are,” Eitri said.

Rocket didn’t say anything for a long moment, the wheels turning in his brain. “You don’t think him dying is the reason the thing is black, do you? He couldn’t really affect that.”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. Unlikely, but possible.”

Rocket was quiet again, eyes still focused on the fathomless black. “I can’t believe that idiot threw himself in a sun. There’s no way he’s coming back from that, right?”

“Likely not, no,” Eitri said, shaking his head. He looked more upset about the situation that Rocket would have expected, but he wasn’t about to ask.

Rocket cursed under his breath and jumped down from the crate. He was going to have to come up with a new plan, it looked like.

 

-

 

Silence meant something different standing on a platform floating in the vacuum of space. It surrounded a person, close and yet infinite. Rocket has always enjoyed the sensation, long used to the far-reaching, edgelessness of space. But not today. Not standing on that cold metal floor, staring at a gauntlet as large as he was without any idea what to do next.

“There’s no point in staring at the thing,” Nebula groused, stalking over to the table and picking the gauntlet up. When she tried to put the thing on her hand, a spark of red light flashed from all six stone settings, and the gauntlet shot halfway across the room with a sound that could be described as nothing short of an angry screech.

"Didn't think you'd squeal over a few sparks," Rocket said, walking over to the gauntlet and picking it up. He didn't try to put the thing on himself. He knew his limits, and an instrument that powerful was probably one of them. He flipped it over to look inside, but there was only more fathomless back. Nothing that would indicate what had caused it to lash out when Nebula tried to put it on. Maybe it was like Thor's old hammer and could only be worn by someone worthy of its power. He snorted to himself, realizing that probably meant whatever dreams Nebula had of wearing the thing were dashed. He hopped up onto a crate to reach the nearest table and set it down, not wanting to hold it for too long should the thing think he was trying to wield it and zap him.

"I didn't make that noise, vermin. The… gauntlet did," she said, crossing her arms over her chest with a sharp glower.

“At least we don’t have to worry about whether or not it has any power to it. Even if it can’t hold the Stones, at least it’s got a kick,” Rocket said.

“What use is it if no one can use it?” Nebula said.

“Just because it would not permit you to use it, that does not mean that it permits no one to use it,” Eitri said, picking the gauntlet up and examining it. His eyes narrow as he looked inside the wrist opening. He looked like he was considering trying it on, but it was sized for someone much smaller than him. Rocket doubted it would fit over his littlest finger. He turned away from them, still holding the gauntlet, and walked over to a work bench. He was still using his instruments to examine it when the ships came.

Six in all, the small fleet parked in a neat row on the far edge of what served as a loading dock. Rocket recognized the craftsmanship of the ships before he realized who they belonged to, though he'd only seen something like them once before, in pieces floating through space, dead Asgardians scattered in the wake of Thanos. Rocket backed himself up against the nearest table as the memory flashed before his eyes.

"What fresh hell is this?" Nebula muttered, pulling out her daggers and prepping her stance as the first hatch lowered to the surface of the forge. Rocket generally didn't go for humanoid creatures, but even he couldn't deny the sex appeal of the woman who stepped down the ramp. Tall and strongly built, the curves of her white and silver armor gleaming in the light of the dying star as she strutted towards them with an expression that told them she knew how good she looked.

"Hello Eitri, you're looking well, considering. It's good to see you again," she said, her voice thick with confidence and the kind of power that could send mortals to their knees.

Eitri wasn't as surprised to see her as Rocket was. He nodded his own greeting without much of a reaction. "Valkyrie. I thought you all died in the Battle of Hela."

A shadow of pain crossed her features. "I have much to atone for in not dying with my sisters, but I do not regret being alive. Which is why we are here—"

"Eitri knows of our dealings with Thanos," came a voice Rocket recognized. Thor stepped around Valkyrie's ship, his new ax propped on his shoulder. "It's good to see you again so soon, my friend," he greeted Eitri, a wide smile on his face that didn't quite meet his eyes.

"I've been told Stormbringer did not succeed in killing Thanos," Eitri said.

Thor's smile dropped. He shook his head, the weight of what happened on Earth clearly heavy on his shoulders. "It was a failure of the wielder, not the weapon."

"Our chances of success were slim to start with. Do not blame yourself."

Thor tried to pull together the remains of his previous cheer, but it didn't quite work. "There is good news. I was able to gather the remains of my people, thanks to the quick thinking of my champion, Valkyrie. I know I failed to protect your people from destruction, but I come to you hoping you will assist in protecting mine. Perhaps together we can defeat Thanos once and for all and reverse the damage he has caused to the universe."

Rocket could see the bedraggled group of Asgardians still huddled in the ships, all watching the exchange with the nervous look of a people trying to feign bravery they didn't actually feel. Rocket's heart went out to them, having lost every friend he had in the world himself. Most of them looked scared, scared and tired.

"We're already working on that," Rocket said, indicating the gauntlet left on Eitri’s workbench.

Thor broke into a genuine smile when he looked at Rocket. "Rabbit! I did not expect to see you here. You look well. But were you not with the Avengers the last time I saw you?"

"Yeah, they weren't getting things done, so I skipped out of town with Deadpool and came here."

"Deadpool?" He frowned, brows knitted together. "Very strange man. I was not aware that you were acquainted with him."

"It's a recent thing. Or it was. He threw himself into the star." Rocket pointed at the dying star in an attempt to explain.

"He what? Why would he do such a thing? I do not believe even his remarkable ability to heal could survive such a force."

"We told him that, but there was no other way to open the forge. It appears to have been for nothing. The gauntlet did not turn out correctly," Eitri said, walking over and picking the thing up to show Thor the discolored sheen of it.

Thor took the glove from him to examine it. "Was the idea to steal the Stones back from Thanos to reverse his spell? Without someone strong enough to wield such a device, the wearer could not hope to survive such an endeavor." He attempted to put the gauntlet on, but another spark of red light flashed and the gauntlet was flung across the room once again, hitting the wall with a hard thunk. Thor frowned, shaking off his hand as if whatever the spark was had hurt him. "What was that?"

"We were just trying to figure that out when you got here. It did the same thing for Nebula. I just thought that meant she wasn't good enough to wear the thing, but if it did it for you, too, there's gotta be something wrong with it," Rocket said, ignoring the annoyed sound Nebula snarled from behind him.

"Very curious…" Thor trailed off, looking at the gauntlet laying on its side for a long moment before shaking himself of his thoughts and turning to Eitri again. "My friend, will you help my people?"

"What else am I to do? My own people are gone, and I am unable to do even the most basic of tasks. If your people will help me to repair the forge, I will do what I can for them."

"Excellent. Thank you, my friend. Together, we will rebuild and become strong once more." Thor clapped Eitri on the shoulder with a shadow of his former smile. He turned to the ships and beckoned his people off, instructing them to follow him to their new quarters to settle in.

As they began to descend from their ships, Rocket took note of how many of them were women and children, what few of them that came off the ships at all. Rocket had heard stories of Asgaurd, though he’d never been there himself. He’d been under the impression that they were a large population, enough to populate a continent, at least. But these few were barely enough to fill a village.

It was easy to get lost in watching the new occupants of Nedavalir find their bearings. The smell of cooking fires soon filtered out to the forge, reminding Rocket how long ago it had been since his last meal. His stomach growled, but he didn’t go to investigate. It wasn’t his place to ask those traumatized people for food.

Unsure what else to do, he went looking for food of his own. His ship was still docked where he‘d parked it when he and Groot brought Thor there the first time. He climbed in and started digging for supplies. He’d just pulled out a freeze-dried pack of pork chops when he froze.

An infant cry rang out, echoing across the forge and out into the cosmos. It caught the attention of more than just Rocket. When he peeked his head out of the hatch of the ship, he spied Eitri approaching the source of the noise. A few Asgardians appeared from the doorway to the eating quarters, curious looks on their faces. Obviously, it wasn’t one of the few infants he’d seen disembark in parents’ arms. Valkyrie appeared from one of the ships, sheathing her sword as she neared Eitri. "What was that?" she asked. They both stood in front of the workbench where the gauntlet had been returned after it had flung itself from Thor.

"Motherfucking cunt lickers, I was about to give her the cream filling," came a tiny, high voice. If Rocket didn't know better, he would have thought the sound came from a baby. But there was no reason one of the infants brought with the Asgardians would be hidden within the gauntlet of all places, let alone one that could talk. He couldn’t be certain about Asgardians, but he thought humanoid children generally couldn’t form speech until they were older.

The voice continued to curse in increasingly colorful ways as more people came to surround it. Rocket climbed out of his ship and went over himself when too many tall creatures blocked his view. He had to throw a few elbows to wade his way through the forest of legs. He climbed up the nearest set of drawers and stood a few feet away from the gauntlet on the bench. The gauntlet shook and rattled until it was shoved aside to reveal a tiny, wriggling baby, naked and angry. It frowned up at all of them. "You made the shiny glove without me? Cold, assholes. Cold."

Everyone stared at the wriggling little thing trying to stand on fat, wobbly baby legs, a serious frown on its precious face. "Thor? What up, awesome to see you! When'd you get here? And who is this lovely lady. Hell-lo there." The baby struck an attempt at a seductive pose and batted its long lashes at Valkyrie. Rocket didn't even think human babies were cute, and even he could tell how disturbing it was.

The room remained silent for a full minute, dwarf, cyborg, and Asgardians alike all horrified at the tiny creature standing before them, until finally Thor spoke. "Deadpool?"

  

-

 

Wade grabbed the spoon Nertha tried to feed him porridge with, scowling at her. “You’re gorgeous, but I’m not into baby play. I can feed myself, thanks,” he said, but as he tried to bring the spoon to his mouth, his hand shook and dropped it, leaving a splat of porridge on the stone floor well below the high dwarven chair he was propped up on. He scowled and waved his hand in front of his face. “What the fuck?”

Nertha smiled indulgently and picked the spoon up off the floor. She wiped it on a napkin and scooped up another spoonful, far more patient than Wade would have expected. “You may be an adult in mind, but your body is still that of a babe. I fear you have not developed the fine motor skills required for gripping a utensil yet. Would you prefer to wait until that muscle memory returns to you, or would you like to stop acting like the baby you are in body and let me help you?’

Wade opened his mouth and swallowed the mouthful when she slid it into his mouth. “Thanks,” he said after swallowing.

“If the dwarf is to be believed, you were willing to sacrifice your life to save the universe and reverse the terrible actions of the Mad Tyrant. It is the least I can do in gratitude for such bravery.”

“It wasn’t that brave. I can’t die.”

“The way he goes on, one might think Thor believes the same about himself, but when fate decides his end has come, I have little doubt he will be proven wrong.”

“I don’t think myself invincible, Nertha, I merely prefer to ignore the possibility,” Thor said, stalking into the room with his cape snapping behind him on a wind all its own. If Wade’s cock had been capable of it, he would definitely have been hard at the sight. What Wade wouldn’t do to rub himself all up on that man.

“Does that cape actually help you in battle? Because it’s hot, but it seems like it would just get in the way a lot. What’s the point?” Wade asked, eyes on Thor even as Nertha fed him another spoonful.

Thor laughed at the question. “It’s stylish, as you say. I’m sure we can have you fitted with one, should you choose. Once you’re back of a height, obviously.” He indicated Wade’s toddler body and the little nightdress they’d put him in. He looked like he was about to go to a christening, but the air flow on his aching legs felt wonderful. He might no longer be feeling the heat of the star on his skin, but he still felt like over-cooked meat on top of the aching muscles.

“Thanks, buddy. That would be amazing.” Wade was already fantasizing about how sexy he’d look in a cape when another mouthful of porridge was presented to him.

“While you regain your strength, might you be able to explain how it was you managed to survive the force of the star and rejuvenate yourself in this manner? I have experience with the forge myself and barely managed to survive, and I don’t mean to be dismissive of your person, but you are a mere human.”

“Believe me, I didn’t think I’d survive either. But my girl Death helped me out. She’s as eager to get the universe back in order as we are, though she’s got a different reason for wanting the souls back in the land of the living. It took me almost the whole time I was dead and a lot of ego stroking—along with a whole lot of other kinds of stroking, eh—” He winked, which earned him a frown from Thor and a hard eye roll from Nertha. “But I got her to agree to help us beat Thanos. She even gave me a nifty little trinket to use to knock him off kilter when it comes down to punching time.”

“The rabbit mentioned you are close to the Lady Death. Are you saying that she told you how to reverse Thanos’ evil deed?” Thor pulled a chair from the table and sat, stealing a piece of fruit from a magical bowl in the middle of the table and beginning to peel it. Wade wasn’t sure what kind of fruit it was, but it was bright blue with swirls of yellow and pink along the rind. It looked delicious.

“Maybe? Death had theories, but even she doesn’t know everything about the Stones. She told me what she knows for sure and what she thinks might do the trick. It’s not going to be as easy as getting the gauntlet and the Stones from Thanos and then just snapping our fingers, though. Once souls are in the Stone, she says a sacrifice will be needed to get them back.”

“What kind of a sacrifice?”

“The same kind that got Thanos the stone in the first place.” Wade clenched his hands in his lap, looked down at the restored grip of his visibly larger fingers. Excited to be able to shovel down the porridge at a fast pace—regeneration always made him hungry, but rebuilding his entire body made the hunger a thousand times worse—he took the spoon from Nertha’s hand and began scarfing down the large bowl she’d made for him.

“One of us must sacrifice ourselves?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. I’ve already got it covered.”

Thor paused in bringing a bite of fruit to his mouth. “You would sacrifice yourself for the universe? Why? If what Steve Rogers has said about your history is true, it does not sound like the universe has given enough to you to warrant such a sacrifice.”

Wade paused in shoveling food into his mouth. Cap was talking about him to other Avengers? A little thrill ran up his back, quickly followed by another, grimmer thought. “You haven’t met Spider-Man before, have you?”

“The young hero Stark’s been mentoring? I have not had the pleasure.”

Wade narrowed his eyes at the mention of Stark. “Stark gave him tech. He hasn’t been mentoring him. I have. He’s good, the best. The kid almost laid his life down for a guy trying to kill him, for fuck’s sake. And Thanos took him. Thanos takes a lot of shit, but that one… Man, I can’t let him do that. Not that sweet little ray of sunshine. He didn’t deserve it. None of them did.”

“And you wish to save them?”

Wade shook his head. “Him. I’m gonna save him. If everyone else gets saved too? Good for them, I guess.” He didn’t need Thor or anyone else thinking he was trying to be a hero. That was the last thing he was.

He could feel Thor’s eyes on him, but didn’t try to meet the look. He had a sinking feeling Thor was thinking exactly what Wade didn’t want him to think. A massive hand slapped him on the shoulder, nearly knocking his tiny body off the giant chair he was perched on. He grabbed onto the table edge of keep himself upright. “You’re a good man, Wade Wilson. Rogers was correct in trusting you.”

Wade glanced up at Thor only to have his suspicions confirmed. He grinned around another mouthful. “Don’t need to stroke my ego so much, buddy. I’d let you stroke my dick instead, but it’s not up to working yet.” He indicated the gauzy fabric that covered his lap.

Thor snorted under his breath and patted Wade’s back again, a little less forceful this time. “Carry on, my friend. Should we both make it out of this alive, we shall have to break bread again.” He stood, taking his fruit with him.

“Did you just ask me out? You’re a hot number, but I’m not gonna be a rebound for that hot little scientist lady you’ve been running around with. My heart couldn’t take it.”

Thor winked at him in the doorway and disappeared. “He was totally checking me out, wasn’t he?” Wade asked Nertha.

“Eat your porridge,” she said with an exasperated look.

 

-

 

Regrowing limbs has always been Wade’s least favorite activity, but this was torture on another level. All the growing pains of two decades of growth spurts crammed into two of the achiest, most pain-in-the-ass days of his life. But he had his life, and that was the important part. If someone had asked him a week ago what the most likely way to kill him so that he stayed dead was, standing in the way of a star would have been high on the list. But apparently the universe wasn’t done with him (or T-Ray’s dark witch magic was just that damn good), because here he was. Alive.

“Congratulations! It appears you have reached manhood,” Thor declared as he stepped into the forge proper from the direction of the private quarters, his booming voice filling the cavernous space and demanding attention. He held a bundle of fabric in his arms as he crossed the forge to where Wade and Rocket were checking the schooner over to make sure it was safe for interstellar travel to get them back to Earth. They both stopped what they were doing and turned to him. Wade had only reached puberty height so far, and Thor towered over them both like Andre the Giant, but hotter.

“Still a little wobbly, but I have all my parts again.” Wade kicked his leg out in demonstration, pulling up the deep red tunic he’d been given to show off the black leather leggings that clung to his skinny bird legs in just the right way. He was thinking about incorporating them into his regular wardrobe once he got home. They would probably make his ass look fantastic once the muscle tone grew back.

“That’s excellent news. I’ve been told you plan to return to Earth to gather a team. Do you not intend to assist the Avengers?”

“I told you those idiots don’t know their ass from their elbow. We got a different plan,” Rocket informed him, turning away from the two of them to continue his checks.

“They know more than you give them credit for, Rabbit. Regardless, I have a present for you, my scarred friend.” He turned to Wade and held up the bundle of fabric, offering it to Wade. “May it serve you in your endeavors as well as mine has served me.”

Wade shook out the fabric to find a cape of black fabric with his logo stitched onto the back in red thread. “Holy shit, this is awesome!” Wade exclaimed, whipping it around his shoulders and securing it around his neck. He didn’t expect the corners to meld themselves to the shoulders of his tunic like they were sewn there. It was interesting to watch, sort of like Strange’s cloak, but not quite. “Woah, badass. Is that magic?”

“Asgardian technology. Near enough. Eitri has told me you will be taking the black gauntlet with you. Is that wise?”

“Pretty sure if you get birthed out of the thing, you get squatter’s rites. Besides, I’m the only one who can wear it without getting zapped. It’s not gonna do you much good if you get all the stones on it, and then can’t put the damn thing on, is it?” he said, swooshing the cape around so that the fabric danced. It was cut to fit his regular height, and it pooled at his feet like a wedding veil. He felt a bit like a princess watching it swoosh around his feet.

“You make a strong point. How do you intend to wrest the Stones from Thanos?’

“Rocket and I are gonna build a team of our own. Thanos looked pretty beat up in the last photos we’ve got of him, and I’m sure he’s smug as fuck over what he did. We’re gonna hit him where it counts and fuck his shit up. I know a coupla guys who have kicked his ass before who are probably eager to do it again.”

“I do not know who these friends of yours might be, but Thanos is far more powerful now than he was when any of them confronted him in the past. Please be careful, my friend. And phone me, should you need assistance.”

Wade paused in grabbing the gauntlet off the table it had been left at since Wade was birthed from it and raised an eyebrow at Thor. “You have a cell phone?”

“No, of course not. What would I do with a phone?”

Wade muttered to himself as he climbed the later to rustle through his pouches to find one of his burners and shoved it in Thor’s hand. “Don’t tell people to call you when they need help if you don’t have a phone for them to call. The numbers written above the screen in sharpie. Don’t lose it.”

“That thing’s not gonna work off Earth, you idiot,” Rocket said as he jumped into the two-seater and pulled on his seat belt. Wade ignored him. Asgardians had their ways.

“Tell Nertha thanks for helping me when I was tiny. I’m still not into baby play, but getting fed by such a beautiful woman was kind of hot. And thanks for the cloak. It’s gonna look badass on my suit.” Wade meant to say his thanks and leave, but before he could stop it, he found himself pulled into the thick arms of a god and hugged to within an inch of his life. He melted into Thor’s massive arms without meaning to. Fuck was Thor good at hugging.

“Stay safe. The universe needs all the heroes we can find now,” Thor told him right in his ear, patting his back hard a couple of times before letting him go. Wade took a second to re-orient, a little dizzy from the smell and feel of being so close to Grade A Prime God like that. He fanned himself with his hand and whistled before winking at Thor and climbing into the ship next to Rocket.

“You stay safe, too. Those arms are too much sexy to lose.”

Thor flexed a little, a pleased smile creeping onto his face as the glass dome slid into place, separating them. He held his hand up in a wave. Behind him, several Asgardians emerged from the living quarters, Valkyrie among them.

“Stop looking like you’re about to go into heat. I don’t think Thor’s into cock,” Rocket informed him, shoving the drive shaft a little harder than necessary with a tight curl to his lips.

Wade sat back in his seat, still waving at Thor. If he had eyelashes, he would have been batting them. “He’s so dreamy,” he cooed.

“Can anyone focus around that man for more than two seconds? For fuck’s sake,” Rocket muttered. He pushed them into drive with a jerky yank of an arm, Wade’s stomach swooping low as they pulled abruptly away from the forge and flew into the cosmos.

Wade turned to Rocket, suddenly curious about the little cyborg’s life. “So, if Thor doesn’t get your motor running, what does? Is there a planet of lady raccoons you can bone?”

“Stop talking.”

“What else are we going to do for however long it’s going to take us to get back to Earth? Tell me about the many loves of Rocket. Are you a tail man? Do sharp claws do it for you? Special fur colors? Are you attracted to humans? What about other beings?”

“Shut. Up.”

“I could tell you about my ex-wives. I’ve got… three? Five? It’s hard to remember which canon to pull from. I think I married Danvers at one point? She doesn’t remember, obviously. Good kisser, though. Worth a punch to the solar plexus.”

“Do you ever stop talking?”

“Of course not. Gotta stay on-brand, dontcha know? I’m the Merc with a Mouth. I might not do the killing part of mercing anymore, but I’m not about to start slacking on the mouth part. The fun would be gone. Can’t have that.”

Rocket glared over at him, the dark patch of fur on his forehead furrowing. It was adorable. “No wonder no one wants to team up with you.”

Wade ignored the dig. “So, what is it? Black whiskers? Spots? Nice big asses? What turns on the Rocketman?”

His answer came in the form on a photon blast to the thigh.

“Oh, I know! Naked mole rats!”

The next one hit him straight in the mouth. He didn’t talk for a while after that, but only because his jaw was reforming. Again.


	5. Enter Peter Parker, Stage Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out what Peter Parker is doing in the Soul Stone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I struggled SO HARD with this chapter, and with the direction this fic was going in general. Thankfully, with a TON of help from Cliophilyra, I've now mostly figured out where we're going from here. Will the rest of the fic be done before Endgame comes out like I hoped? Unlikely. But I have no intention of including Endgame spoilers in this fic, so no worries there. THANK YOU SO MUCH to Cliophilyra for being such a massive help on this! It likely would not have come out without you. And even if it had, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as it is with your help. Thank you so much!

When Peter woke up, he was laying flat on his back in a puddle of water and the entire world was red. He sat up, the slosh of the water barely a sound.  He wasn’t on the same planet he’d been on when he… died. He’d felt himself die, felt the pain of his body disintegrating even as he fought with all his strength against it, seen the pain in Mr. Stark’s eyes as he fell apart. He should be terrified, angry, at least in shock, but he didn’t feel any of that. He just felt… peaceful. Calm. Disconnected, but it didn’t feel like he was in shock. He poked at his arm and felt the touch. That meant he had a body at least. 

“Hey kid, glad you’re awake. I been worried,” someone said from above him. He looked up to find Quill standing in front of him, holding a hand out as if he meant to help Peter up. 

Peter narrowed his eyes, ignoring the gesture. “Why? We’re all dead, aren’t we?”  _ No thanks to you. _  He stood, brushing his suit off, surprised that he wasn’t soaked through. He reached down to swirl his fingers through the water, watching it ripple and react to his touch. He could feel the cool texture against his skin, but when he pulled his fingers back to his face, they were dry. “Weird,” he muttered to himself. When he looked back up, Quill was watching him with a bemused expression.

“Yeah, I noticed that, too, when I was tryin’ to wake you up. Doesn’t seem like we can get wet. Pretty sure it’s ‘cause we’re dead,” Quill told him. “Fuckin’ Thanos,” he muttered under his breath. He looked off into the distance as if he were searching for something. “Wonder why it’s just us. Thought he wanted to get rid of half of everyone. Drax and Mantis disappeared before I did, didn’t they?” 

Peter didn’t understand what he was talking about. They were surrounded by other people. Strange was hovering a few feet away, his eyes closed, meditating. Quill’s friends were talking quietly a few yards farther away. There were more people beyond that, more of them than Peter knew how to process, not all of them human. More people than Peter had ever seen in his life, and he lived in New York City. 

Had lived. Now he was here, in this strange, breathtakingly beautiful place. There were mountains in the far distance, and shallow water, dotted with sandy islands as far as the eye could see. There were trees, too. They looked close to dragon blood trees, but with deep crimson bark and bright red leaves. A cluster of people stood under the nearest, huddled together and looking as lost as Peter felt. 

Peter turned away from Quill to step into Strange’s space. “Doctor Strange, sir? Are you alright?” he asked.

Strange’s eyes popped open, staring right into Peter’s face with unnerving intensity. “I’m quite well, all things considered,” he answered, as quick and lucid as though he had been talking to Peter the whole time.

“What are you doing?” Peter asked. He could feel Quill approach from behind him.

“Who you talkin’ to, kid? There’s no one there,” Quill told him. Peter shot him a look. 

“Why can’t he see you, sir?” he asked Strange.

“His soul is not pure enough. Too full of guilt and anger over his lost lover. The Soul Stone only permits those with the purest intentions to interact with others.”

Peter paused, not sure how to take that answer. Quill was still talking, but Peter ignored him. It was Quill’s fault they were all dead, and Peter wasn’t quite ready to forgive him for that. “Can you see Mr. Quill?” he asked Strange instead, not sure what answer he wanted to hear.

“No,” was the simple answer, short and to the point. Peter had more questions, but wasn’t sure if it would be impolite to ask them. 

He hesitated. “Can you see… the other people?”

“There is a woman standing far in the distance under an archway. Green skin, dark red hair. I believe she is Gamora, the woman Quill spoke of.” 

Peter turned to look in the direction Strange was looking and found that he could see the archway, and the woman who stood underneath it. It looked like a giant, strange pagoda arch. The closest structure Peter had ever seen in real life was the Friendship Archway in Brooklyn. The woman underneath it flickered between the figure of an adult and a child of eight or nine as Peter looked at her. It was disorienting to watch. He turned back to Strange. “No one else?”

“No. The Soul Stone does not like that I know how to manipulate it. Even if I had the purest of intentions, it would not let me interact with the other souls.”

“Then, why can you see me?”

“Because you want me to. Your will is much stronger than the Stone is used to dealing with. It is… intriguing.” Strange tilted his head to the side, examining Peter like a bug under glass. Peter was doing his best to keep his panic tamped down and quiet, but the voice in the back of his head was starting to yell.

He looked around at all the people surrounding them and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat, a cold feeling of dread creeping up the back of his neck. There should have been sweat beading on his temple, but his skin remained weirdly dry. “Is that why I can see all these people?” he asked.

Strange looked even more interested in him. His cape flickered around him in the nonexistent wind with an odd kinetic energy, almost as if it were excited. “How many people do you see?”

“I don’t know. More than I’ve ever seen before. It looks like half the universe is hanging out. And everyone looks confused.”

Strange smiled, but it wasn’t the kind that reached his eyes. “A very strong will, indeed. We can use that.”

Peter had no idea how, but he wasn’t going to argue with a wizard. When Strange let his feet reach the ground again and walked away, Peter followed. 

-

Strange hadn’t spoken in several hours except to tell Peter to stop talking when his nervous chatter got to be too much. Peter couldn’t help it. The more people he saw, the more his panic threatened to engulf him, and talking was the only way to release the pressure. So far he had told Strange the entire plot of Star Wars, explained quantum mechanics in depth, and gone through the restoration of every one of his video game consoles. They had walked for miles and miles, what felt like the entire length of Manhattan, and yet there were still more people to see and, in the distance, an endless stretch of mountains they never seemed to reach.

“Peter!” a familiar voice cried out from behind him.

Peter whipped around to see a familiar crowd of kids his age huddled under a tree.  _ No, no, no, no, no, no, no,  _ he thought over and over, shocked and heartbroken to see MJ running towards him, water splashing around her feet as she crossed the distance and slammed into his arms. “You’re alive, thank god,” she gasped. “Do you know where we are? None of us remember what happened, we just woke up…” She pulled back suddenly, brows furrowed in confusion as she took in his suit, her hands sliding down his shoulders to his biceps. She traced her fingers over one of the blue and gold bands that circled his arm just below the elbow. “What…?”

Peter swallowed, willing himself not to hyperventilate. It didn’t matter if she knew he was Spider-Man now, not when they were both dead. He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting against the urge to be sick as the reality of their situation threatened to overwhelm him again. At least he knew instinctively that Aunt May wasn’t here, the same way he knew Wade wasn’t here either. He had hoped the same would be true of MJ, that she would be still back on Earth. He could deal with this—whatever this was—knowing that the people he loved most were still alive and still able to have some semblance of a life. Maybe not the same life, and maybe a lot more difficult a life—he shuddered to think what Earth must be going through now with so many people gone—but still a life with a future ahead of them and maybe some kind of happily ever after. Not… trapped. Not here in whatever not-reality they were in now. Not dead. “Is Ned here?” he found himself asking.

Peter scanned the faces of his classmates, but the same part of him that knew May and Wade were alive knew that Ned was, too. Flash was there, though, his eyes the size of golf balls as he stared  at Peter in his suit. 

“Peter, why are you dressed like weird disco Spider-Man? What’s going on?” MJ asked, her frown deepening.

He hesitated, his words skipping with his heartbeat. “I uh… surprise?” he said, turning back to her with an awkward smile. 

MJ just stared at him. And stared. And stared.

“What’s with the Drag Race knock-off Spidey suit, Parker? This takes the whole ‘I know Spider-Man’ thing a little too far, don’t you think? No one cares. We’re all dead,” Flash interrupted, approaching them with a cocky smirk. It was an act, Peter could tell. There was a nervous tension to his shoulders and his eye twitched every few seconds. 

Peter shot him an incredulous look. “I’m not trying to be cool. This is my suit.” He looked down at the suit, stiff and metallic and colored to match Mr. Stark’s. It wasn’t necessarily his style, but he couldn’t fault the thing for saving his life. For whatever that was worth now. 

“Are you trying to say you’re Spider-Man now?” Flash crossed his arms over his chest, some of the tension leaving him as he settled into making fun of Peter.

Peter shot a web out and snatched Flash’s beanie off his head, snapping his wrist in a quick move that had the beanie in his hands faster than Flash could track the movement. “I’m not trying to say anything. I  _ am _ Spider-Man.”

MJ appeared to recover at this confirmation, and she stepped in front of Flash, elbowing him aside so she could command Peter’s attention again. “Do you know what happened to us? If you’re really Spider-Man, then you really do know Tony Stark right? Did he tell you anything? Is there a way for us to get out of this?”

“Why just us?” Betty Brant asked from a few feet away. Peter hadn’t noticed her drifting over from the group, but now she stood behind Flash with her arms wrapped around her body and a lost expression on her face. Her eyes were puffy and red and her mascara had run trails down her cheeks. He had never seen her look anything but perfectly put-together, but seeing her now was just another reminder of how wrong this all was. 

“It’s not just us. It’s half the universe, according to Doctor Strange. You just can’t see everyone else because of the way this place works,” he told her. “As far as I can tell, anyway,” he finished, uncertainty creeping up.

“Then, how do you know it’s not just us if you can’t see anyone else, dipshit?” Flash asked, eyes narrowed and accusatory, as if Peter might be hiding something. 

Peter didn’t take the bait. “ _ I  _ can see everyone. I don’t know how, but I can. Besides, half the universe was what Thanos said he wanted to get rid of when he did this. He said he had to wipe out half of all life to fix the balance, or something? I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. It didn’t make sense.”

“Who’s Thanos?” MJ asked.

“More importantly, who’s this Doctor Strange guy you’re so hot for?” Flash added, stepping a little in front of MJ.

Peter opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by Strange calling to him from a distance. “Mr. Parker, who are you talking to now?” Peter turned to see him standing in a puddle a hundred yards away. Peter hadn’t thought the man was paying attention to him anymore, but Strange was walking back towards him now with a frown. Peter had a flash moment of worry that Strange might have heard what Flash said about him, but he must have been too far away because he didn’t react.

“My friends from school. The ones that, uh… you know.” Peter indicated them with a hand gesture before realizing Strange probably couldn’t see them.

Strange narrowed his eyes for just a moment, then smiled a doctor’s smile, not at Peter, but at MJ, Flash, and Betty. They all took a step back like they had just seen a ghost. “Hello, you all look as though you are handling our current situation as well as can be expected,” he greeted them. 

“Where did you come from?” Flash asked, doing a double-take and trying to peer around Strange, as if to check what was behind him.

“Your friend’s will.” Strange looked at Peter with something like pride.

“Are you saying I did this?” Peter asked.

“I believe so, Mr. Parker. Your determination to make interpersonal connections would appear stronger than the force that holds us.”

“You must be confused, mister. Pete’s a weakling. He couldn’t will a barista to make him coffee,” Flash said, snatching his beanie back from Peter and shoving it back on his head.

“I literally just told you I’m Spider-Man. You went on a whole praise rant about me just last week. What the hell, dude?” Peter said, indicating his suit with a flick of his hand.

“That was before I knew it was you, asswipe.”

Peter held his hands up and turned to MJ for help, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“This is a lovely high school drama, and all, but I have things to do. If any of you are in need of assistance, let Mr. Parker know.” Strange nodded to Peter’s group, and walked away. Peter wanted to follow him, but he also didn’t want to leave his friends, even if one of those ‘friends’ was Flash. 

“Was that guy a wizard or something?” Betty asked.

Peter pulled at his hair, watching Strange’s cape swing behind him in the nonexistent breeze as he walked away. “Honestly? I have no idea.”

-

Peter had stretched out onto his back an hour ago, tired of answering his friends' seemingly endless questions about being Spider-Man. He didn't even care about the strange feeling of sitting in water without getting wet. His brain hurt too much from trying to parse the oddly specific questions Betty had about what the Winter Soldier's arm felt like. 

"But was it cold? It looks like it would be cold, but he can hold a plum so delicately. I thought maybe it was warm from his body heat. Could you tell through your suit?" she asked, leaning on a hand in the water a foot from Peter's head. The group of them had all sat down in a circle around him to listen and ask their own questions. It would figure he became popular _after_ his death.

Doctor Strange came walking back up to them with a determined look on his face just in time to save Peter from having to answer Betty. The group of them looked up at him as one, a few shading their eyes from the blood red sun at his back. "Mr. Parker, I find myself in need of your services. If my intuition is correct, you and I are not the only… enhanced individuals on this plane of existence. I wish to make contact with as many of the others as you can locate. Would you be so kind?" 

"Like Mr. Quill?" Peter asked, sitting up.

Strange's face pinched up as if in pain. "Not like Quill. I was thinking perhaps Dr. Banner or Tony Stark."

"Mr. Stark isn't here. He would have shown up where we did, like Mr. Lord and his friends did if he was. I haven't ever met Mr. Banner. Who's he again?"

"The Hulk," Betty informed him, grinning and moving as if to stand. 

Peter was on his feet before her and tried to wave her off. "Uh, maybe you stay here. We don't know how other people are coping with this whole… being dead thing. I don't know if you can be killed again, but maybe we shouldn't test it," he told her. Her face fell, but she settled back on the ground. 

"Agreed. Mr. Parker will return to you after he has finished assisting me. Please remain where you are in the interim," Strange told his friends. "I will leave me cloak to protect you." The cloak flew off of Strange's back and floated a few inches above the water just outside the circle of the group, swooshing back and forth in an oddly protective manner. 

"If you see Bucky Barnes, you have to promise to let me meet him. I might not be able to be President someday now that I'm dead, but I can meet that gorgeous hunk of man meat," Betty said, as if that settled the matter. 

Peter glanced sideways at Strange. "Right. I'll uh… see what I can do." 

As they walked away in the direction of… Peter wasn't sure where Strange was taking him, Peter tried to think of a way to apologize for Betty's description of Bucky Barnes. "I uh… you can ignore Betty. She says a lot of stuff she shouldn't when she's stressed. She didn't mean to objectify Mr. Barnes that way. I don't know if you're friends with him or anything, but maybe don't tell him—"

"That he was objectified by a teenage girl? I'm sure it won't come up. It was, however, a refreshing reminder as to why I avoid teenagers at all cost. Please do not force me to add you to that category, Mr. Parker."

"I'll… do my best," Peter finished lamely. This was going to be a long day.

-

The sun was starting to set by the time Peter found anyone Strange was interested in connection with. He recognized the black vibranium armor before he recognized the face. King T'Challa was surrounded by what looked like his subjects, men and women in armor of their own, all of them serious and somber. The only outlier was a girl about his age in a bright orange clear plastic coat. She was talking to T'Challa, standing a little closer to him than Peter would feel comfortable standing next to a monarch. He felt weird interrupting, so he held his hand out to Doctor Strange for him to pause and waited until there was a break in the conversation. Several eyes drifted to him in the meantime, at least two women in armor narrowing their eyes at him. 

"Uh… sorry to interrupt, Mr. Panth—King T'Cha—Your Highness," Peter stuttered, feeling his cheeks redden as he fumbled through to a proper form of address. He'd never met royalty before. They might have fought together that once, but Peter had never actually spoken to him before.

T'Challa turned at his voice and the girl narrowed her eyes at Peter to match the two older women. T'Challa's face changed when he took in Peter's suit. "Spider-Man, I would say it is a pleasure to see you, but I am not pleased to see anyone in this realm. Are you well?"

"I uh… it's Peter, actually. Peter Parker. I uh… I didn't mean to bother you all, but Doctor Strange asked me to help him connect with other uh… heroes? Doctor?" Peter turned to Strange, hoping for help out of his awkward explanation. 

Half of the Wakandans took a step back in the next second, all eyes on Strange. Which was... something Peter was going to have to get used to. He might have to borrow Strange’s cloak and get himself a magician name if this kept up. He could at least come up with a dramatic hand gesture if he had any way to be able to tell when exactly his weird magic revealing trick worked. Or how.

“King T’Challa, it is an honor. My name is Doctor Stephen Strange. I was working with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner when Earth was attacked by the Children of Thanos. Now that we have found ourselves within this realm, I thought it would be advantageous to connect with other enhanced individuals to begin to formulate our plan of escape. Mr. Parker is assisting me.”

“How’s he doing that?” the girl asked, stepping in front of the king and right into Peter’s personal space, poking his chest with her finger. “Are you using light shielding? Portable holographic generator? Is this part of the spider sense thing you have?” she asked, continuing to examine him like he was a specimen in a lab.

“Who are you?” Peter asked, unsure how to answer this stranger’s questions.

“Princess Shuri of Wakanda. My brother told me about what you did in Germany. You really are just a kid, aren’t you? How old are you?”

“Eighteen. And who are you calling a kid? You don’t look any older.”

Shuri looked uninterested in answering. “So how do you do it? I thought your spider sense was a danger thing. How are you hiding this man?”

“I’m not.” Peter looked to Strange again for help. Strange looked more interested in Shuri than in helping Peter.

“Mr. Parker has a stronger will than the Soul Stone’s power to manipulate our perceptions. The Stone wishes to prevent me from interfering with its work by hiding me from others. Mr. Parker is able to break through that barrier.”

“Really? That’s fascinating.” What followed was a series of questions asked so quickly that Peter had a hard time keeping up, but only until he began understanding the thread of what she was asking, and then they were off talking about quantum entanglement and theoretical physics until well after the world had turned a deep burgundy. 

Peter found himself yawning into his hand and was surprised by the gesture. Did the dead yawn? That would imply that his diaphragm was still functioning, wouldn’t it? But he wasn’t breathing.

Except he was. Now that he was aware of it, he could feel his lungs expanding and contracting normally. A little awkwardly now that he was paying attention, but still relatively normal. He looked around at the people surrounding them to note some of the Wakandans were eating some sort of fruit, sitting on the ground together in groups, talking. Some were watching them talk. Now that he was seeing others eat, his stomach started growling loud enough for others to hear. 

“Are we supposed to be hungry if we’re dead?” he asked, scratching his head.

“That is an excellent question.” Strange peered towards the groups eating with a pensive look. 

-

It turned out all the trees Peter had seen held a strange blood red fruit that was like biting into a flavorless orange. They weren’t fun to eat, but they satisfied the hunger pangs, so Peter was learning to tolerate them. He ate while chatting with Shuri about life in Wakanda and exchanging their personal stories of the events that led up to their deaths. It was surreal to talk about the such horrific experiences as if they had happened a long time ago, rather than less than a day prior, but something about being able to hear Shuri’s story made him feel slightly less bleak about his own. 

He had his mouth full of fruit as he spotted two familiar figures walking by in the distance and tried to call out to them. Their names turned into a garbled mess, so Peter shot a web towards a tree they were passing under and zipped into, snagging a branch for balance a few feet above their heads. He swallowed the last of the fruit quickly to be able to speak clearly while the two men stared up at him like he was a car crash unfolding in front of them. “Excuse me, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Falcon, sorry to interrupt, but—” he started, but Falcon interrupted him.

“You that bug guy from Germany? Spider-guy?” He turned and pushed at Barnes’ shoulder with an annoyed look. “Man, I knew he was a kid,” he muttered to Barnes before turning his attention back up to Peter. “How old are you, thirteen?” 

Why was everyone so concerned with his age? There were more important things to worry about. “That doesn’t matter. Doctor Strange asked me to find you. He’s trying to gather heroes to find a way to get us out of here.”

“Doctor Who?” Barnes asked, looking from Peter to Falcon and back for an answer.

“Doctor Strange. He’s… I don’t really know. A wizard, I guess? He helped Mr. Stark, Mr Starlord, and a couple aliens fight Thanos before he uh… did his thing.” He indicated the world around them as further explanation of his point. 

“We’re dealing with wizards now? For fuck’s sake,” Barnes muttered, turning away and tugging at his hair with his metal hand. Peter wanted to swing down and examine it because it was just _so cool_ , but now probably wasn’t the time.

“We’ll meet your wizard. You see anyone else around? Maybe uh… Captain America?”

“I don’t believe he’s here, sir. I only met him the once so I probably couldn’t get a sense of him myself, but I haven’t heard anything about him being seen yet.”

Falcon peered up at him for a long moment. “I’m going to pretend that made sense and move on. Where’s this wizard dude? The sooner we can start making plans, the quicker we can get out of here and kick Thanos’ ass.”

Peter hopped down from the tree and pointed towards where the Wakandans were gathered. “He’s with King T’Challa over there,” he explained and walked them over. 

-

“You remember that time Wade tried start a cooking show, but he kept forgetting to clean the blood off his suit before filming and YouTube finally deleted his channel for gore?” 

Peter froze at the words. He was supposed to be meeting his friends to collect fruit with a few of the Wakandans, but this was too important. Three weeks into their situation, and Peter had assumed he had run into everyone in this new world that he could possibly know, but he definitely knew that story. Wade had told him about it on a rooftop in Harlem while they sparred, trying to distract Peter enough to override his spidey senses. It hadn’t worked. 

Peter turned to see an old woman in the kind of giant black sunglasses blind people wear and a velvet tracksuit—Peter hadn’t even known those still  _ existed _ —sitting on a rock. A scruffy looking man in his late thirties sat in a puddle at her feet, methodically pulling the bark off a tree branch with a pocket knife. Peter recognized the two of them immediately. 

“Blind Al? Weasel?” he asked eagerly, walking over to them. They looked around sharply, the man staring directly at him while the woman looked slightly past his shoulder. 

“Who’s that?” she asked, frowning.

“Uh… I think it’s Spider-Man,” Weasel said with a confused scratch of his head.

Peter gave an awkward smile and waved. “Hi, sorry, I know you don’t know me, but Wade told me so much about you, I had to say hello. My name’s Peter, by the way. Peter Parker.” 

Al frowned hard, shifting position to hear him better. “How old are you? You sound like a child,” she said in a disbelieving tone.

This age thing was really starting to annoy him, but he answered her patiently. “It’s hard to tell how long we’ve been here by now, but I turned eighteen a few months before the uh… before coming here.”

“Before we all bit it, yeah. Man, Wade really was trying to rob the cradle, wasn’t he?” Weasel said, smirking. “Always thought he was hiding a creepy old pedo under all those jokes.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “He didn’t know how old I was until I unmasked. Give him a break. The Daily Bugle kept saying I was twenty-five.” 

“Yeah well, doesn’t matter now, does it?” Weasel waved a hand at the world around them, their surroundings colored a bright cherry red in the early morning. “I bet he’s real pissed to find out you’re here. Unless he is, too? I heard a rumor there’s a lot more people here than Al and I can see.”

“He’s not here. We aren’t lucky enough to find an afterlife where that cockroach can’t bother us,” Al muttered. 

Peter shot her a look, but didn’t say anything. He knew what her relationship with Wade was like. “She’s right, he isn’t. As far as Doctor Strange and I can tell, I can see everyone in the Soul World and I haven’t seen Wade.” Saying it out loud made his heart clench, but only for a moment. Weeks into their current situation, the reality of what they had lost was becoming less painful, the edges of it rounding out and dulling to an ache in the back of the heart.

Weasel narrowed his eyes at Peter like he was a puzzle piece he needed to place. “That right?”

Peter was starting to get uncomfortable with the way people looked at him when he told them he could see more people than they could. Maybe he should stop? “Are you guys doing okay?” he asked, changing the subject. “I’ve been working with the Wakandans to organize foraging groups and stuff so people don’t go hungry. I know we’re all dead, technically, but it seems like we still have human needs. I can bring you something to eat if you need anything.” 

“Unless you can conjure up some Häagen-Dazs, I’m good. I’m hoping if I starve myself, maybe I’ll die again and end up somewhere better than this shit hole,” Al said. Peter would have laughed if he didn’t worry she might mean it. He couldn’t make an adult woman eat if she didn’t want to, but he would bring them some food when he was finished foraging. 

A rough hand slapped him on the back hard enough to knock him forward a step, surprised that his spidey sense hadn’t warned him to brace for impact. “You coming foraging or what?” Mr. Barnes asked. “I’m definitely not climbing those trees. Hell on the knees jumping down,” he said, smiling warmly in a way that reminded Peter of Captain America.

Peter ducked his head to hide his blush. Apparently he and Betty shared a type, and it was gorgeous men with arms the width of his head and military swagger. Peter blamed Wade. Peter blamed Wade for a lot of things. “Yeah, sorry, I got caught up talking to a couple of Wade’s friends.” He indicated the two of them with one hand, hoping Bucky could see them. So far, his ability to connect the various people in his life with each other in the Soul World had been hit or miss at best. He had been able to introduce the supers he knew to his friends fairly easily, but he hadn’t managed to connect Peter Quill to anyone but the other Guardians. Except Gamora. Not even Peter had been able to talk to Gamora. Every time anyone tried to approach her, it was like trying to walk in the wrong direction on an escalator. It was like she existed in a universe all to herself.

Bucky blinked in the direction of Weasel and Al for a moment before nodding at them and turning back to Peter to ask, “Wade?”

“Deadpool?” Peter had no idea if the Winter Soldier had ever had any run-ins with Wade, but the way Deadpool got around the universe, he wouldn’t be surprised. The way Bucky’s smile morphed into a pinched little frown told Peter he was probably right to assume they’d met. 

“We’re gonna have to have a talk about who you hang out with, kid. Let’s go find your friends before one of them tries to do something stupid and breaks something. I can make a splint out of pretty much anything, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it.” 

Peter was inclined to agree. He loved his friends dearly, but Flash especially was proving to be even more of a menace now that he knew Peter was Spider-Man than he ever was in school. He seemed to need to prove he was better than Peter at every physical activity they did. He had already fallen off a short cliff and sprained his ankle. Peter didn’t trust him not to fall out of a tree. 

He said goodbye to Weasel and Blind Al and followed Bucky, mentally promising to collect enough fruit to bring them some later. 

Al ate the strange red starfish fruits when he dropped them off. Peter tried not to be pleased about it.

He failed.

-

“It’s Gamora. She has to be the key to all this. Why else would the Stone be working so hard to keep her from us?” Strange muttered, more to himself than to Peter. It was possible he didn’t even know Peter was standing next to him. 

“Wasn’t she Thanos’ daughter? Maybe it isn’t the Stone keeping her from us. Maybe she feels guilty for her part in this, like Mr. Quill,” Peter replied, earning him a sharp look of surprise from Strange. 

“Do you often sneak up on people while they’re trying to concentrate?”

“I’ve been standing next to you for five minutes, sir.” 

“Oh. Did you need something?” Strange asked, focusing his attention on Peter. His beard had grown out a little in the time they had been in the Soul World and was starting to look a little wild. Peter wondered if he would grow a beard if they were there long enough, but quickly scoffed at that idea. He was fairly certain facial hair just wasn’t in the cards for him, no matter how old he got. The one time he’d tried to grow it, he’d gotten exactly three hairs, and they’d been too light to distinguish from his skin anyway. It was an exercise in futility, and he wasn’t going to worry about it. 

“I was wondering how the plan was coming along to get us out of here? We’ve been here for over a month, as far as I can tell. Shouldn’t we be doing something by now?”

“Perhaps. Plans take time, Mr. Parker. Especially when the only resources we have are each other. Are you still able to see the majority of the people here?” Strange asked, indicating the vast land full of people with a sweep of his hand. 

“Yeah, as far as I can tell. I’ve been able to talk to everyone I’ve tried to talk to. Except Gamora. She’s too far away, and she doesn’t get any closer when I try to walk to her.”

Strange turned away from him once more to frown in Gamora’s direction. “She has to be the key. It seems significant that even you cannot reach breach whatever barrier separates her from us. If we could find a way to connect the three of us, I believe we could break the Stone’s hold on us. The question is how.”

They stood there for a long time, staring at the lone woman in the distance. No answers came to either of them.

  
  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6: Wade Assembles a Team, and Breaks a Lot of Bones in the Process

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter didn't make it out before Endgame did, but FEAR NOT! I have not included any Endgame spoilers in this chapter, and won't be using any spoilers for Endgame from now on (at least none that anyone might recognize as a spoiler. I might steal a setting or two). There will be a few minor spoilers for Captain Marvel coming up next chapter, though. Cat-related spoilers. I'll put a warning up before the chapter, though, so no worries!
> 
> Thank you again to 9th_Pawn for the alpha read and Cliophilyra for the beta! This chapter gave me a lot of angst, and y'all both helped me through it. Thank you!

Wade had been too busy texting potential teammates once they reached satellite range to notice where they were when Rocket finally parked the three-seater on Earth. When he spotted the fake turrets and mismatched stone of what corporate America thought a castle should look like, Wade’s mood immediately lifted. Fuck Logan for blocking his numbers, at least he was about to see some jousting and maybe eat enough chicken to stuff a horse.  “Interesting choice for dinner. I wouldn’t have taken you for a Renaissance man.”

Rocket gave him an unreadable look. “The plan is to go back in time and steal the Stones before Thanos gets ‘em, right?” He unbuckled his seatbelt and hopped down from his chair as the glass windshield rose up out of their way and the little ladder descended to the ground.

Wade unbuckled his own belt slowly, not sure what a chain dinner theater restaurant in New Jersey had to do with going back in time. “Uh huh. Are we going on a snack run first? I can’t fault your choice of chow. Their chicken legs are good enough to slaughter a whole army for, but I’m not really understanding the connection.”

“What are you talking about food for? We got things to do.” Rocket jumped out of his ship without waiting for Wade’s answer and started marching towards the entrance to the building. Wade waffled over whether or not he should bring the gauntlet, but the desire to look like a badass outweighed the possibility of losing it. No one could take it, after all, since no one but Wade could even touch it without getting a hell of a shock. 

He scrambled out of the ship with his new cape in his hands and hurried after Rocket, his brain warring between trying to figure out what Rocket’s plan was and excitement over their apparent dinner plans. He snapped the cape open as he walked and swung it around to drape over his shoulders, where it slipped into place like there were magnets attached to his shoulders. Asgardian technology was truly the gift that kept on giving. He grinned and stood up straighter, puffing his chest up to imitate Thor’s confident strut as he followed his tiny friend into the building.

The man at the front door dressed in full armor bowed low to them, his armor clanking together as he moved. “Good evening, my lord. Welcome to Medieval Times. May your visit be full of wonder and joy, and may you leave us with a full belly and a happy heart.” 

Wade bowed back, doing his best to look like a regal lord. When in Rome, and all. Rocket ignored the man and walked straight to the ticket booth like a raccoon on a mission and began speaking. 

The woman at the ticket booth looked alarmed at whatever Rocket was asking her. She turned her attention to Wade as soon as he stepped up behind Rocket as if for guidance. “Sir, is this your support animal? If so, he needs to be on a leash in order to remain on the premises,” she informed him, eyeing Rocket like he might have fleas. 

Rocket waved the comment off. “He might look ugly, but I swear he’s house trained. Besides, he’d try to stab me if I put a leash on him. Even though I’d like to.” Rocket muttered that last part with a side-eye to Wade. 

“Oh my goodness, I thought you were a support raccoon, sir. I apologize. Your costume is phenomenal,” she told Rocket, smiling down at him with a weird gleam in her eyes. 

“Costume?” Rocket asked, looking up at Wade for clarification.

Wade was busy eyeing the show times and trying to figure out whether or not Rocket would like the Queen’s Royal package—you got to sit in the front row that way and flirt with the knights—and was only partially paying attention to the conversation. He grinned at the woman, turning around to show off his cape, spreading the fabric out for her to see the embroidered design. “I know, right? Those Asgardians really know how to make a cape. They’d make a killing at the Ren Faire.” 

The woman nodded, expression bemused but pleasant. “Do you have a reservation, or will you be purchasing tickets today?” she asked.

Wade pulled out a credit card he’d swiped from Weasel’s office from one of his pouches and slapped it onto the little counter. “Are there any Queen’s Royal seats left for the 7:30 show?”

-

“So, how does this work? Do we request which time we’d like to go back to? Is there a device we can steal?” Rocket asked in a loud whisper as soon as a lady in waiting had delivered them to their seats. 

“They have menus, probably.” Wade swept his cape out of the way and took his seat, right in the center of the front row. Medieval Times wasn’t as hot a ticket as he would have expected on a Tuesday night after half the planet had been killed. All the more for him to enjoy. Extinction-level events had to be good for something. 

“Oh, that makes sense.” Rocket climbed up onto his own seat and surveyed the place setting.

A few minutes later, he slammed his menu down with a string of curses that had ten different families glaring in their direction, and most of it hadn’t even been in an Earth dialect. “What the fuck? This is a dinner menu,” he sneered, shoving the menu away from his face and turning to Wade, ready to fight.

Wade side-eyed him, busy trying to decide if he wanted the mead or the spice cider or maybe Ye Olde Pepsi with dinner. “Uh yeah? What did you think it was?”

“Time travel! What else would I be trying to do right now? We’re supposed to be going back to get the Stones before Thanos gets his grubby hands on them, not eating whatever a chicken leg is!” 

“Wait, you thought a kids birthday restaurant had time travel tech?” Wade took a moment to process the absurdity of this new knowledge before hunching over his plate, laughing until tears trickled down his cheeks. This was too good. He had to tell Peter.

“Yes! Obviously! The website said they offered an authentic medieval experience! That means they take you back to the time.”

“No it doesn’t. Those are actors. This is all fake. They don’t have dinner theater in space?”

Rocket gave him a look of pure vitriol. Wade hadn’t even known a raccoon had that many teeth. “Do I look like the kind of idiot who goes to dinner theater to you?” he snarled. 

“I thought you liked fun. No need to be a dick about it. Dinner theater is a time-honored tradition.”

Rocket gave him a withering look. “If you knew this place wasn’t using time travel tech, why’d you buy the tickets?”

Wade swept a hand over the arena in front of them with all their colorful banners and bright lights and the smell of horse shit in the air. “Who wouldn’t want to bask in the glory of this place? Look at it! Everyone’s in costume. Guys are about to come out on horses with giant sticks to poke each other. This place is so much fun! Violence, fun accents, chicken legs the size of your head, what more could you want in life?”

Rocket was still giving him a look of death. “You’re an idiot. Let’s go.” He jumped off his chair and stormed off, shoving past several servers who squealed when they saw him and tried to call a manager. 

Wade pouted after him. “So we aren’t staying for dinner?” He followed his compatriot out, stealing a chicken leg off kid’s plate and ignoring the kid’s indignant cry.

“Mommy, that monster man stole my chicken!” 

Fuck that kid. 

-

After the failed attempt at time travel, Wade came to the realization that Rocket had no idea how Earth worked and took over the plan.

“So why do you think this guy’s gonna work with us, again? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who plays well with others,” Rocket said, climbing onto a newspaper stand next to Wade’s shoulder. Down the block, Juggernaut ripped the door off a health food store and flung it across the street.

“He’s a total dick, but he’s indestructible, and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be willing to do whatever the fuck he has to to reverse Thanos’s little trick.”

“What makes you think that?

Wade held up the tablet he’d stolen from Hawkeye, Black Tom Cassidy’s profile pulled up on the screen with Status: DECEASED marked next to his picture. “Big guy’s lover got dusted with everyone else. I’ll bet all the Girl Scout cookies left in my freezer he’s looking for a way to get Tommy Boy back right now with some kind of druid magic spell that’s not gonna work. We just have to bring him around to our way of thinking.”

“You have a cape now? Who thought that was a good idea?” a familiar voice said behind them. Wade whipped around to find Domino standing there in full gear, hands on her hips, eyebrow raised at him. 

“Thor. Pretty great, right? I think it makes me look dashing,” he said, spreading it out to show it off to her. 

“You look like somethin’ alright. What stupid thing are you doing now? Is that a raccoon?” A loud crash further down the block drew her attention and her eyes got wide when she saw Juggernaut dragging a poor employee out of the health food store and slamming him up against a building to yell at him about herbs. “Oh no, not again. We barely survived the last time we messed with him. What the fuck, Wade?”

“Who’s this chick and why does everyone keep calling me a raccoon?” Rocket grumbled, cocking his laser gun like he might shoot her if he didn’t like her answer.

“You look like a raccoon. What else are we supposed to think you are?” Dom asked, unintimidated by the weapon. 

“I’m Rocket. I’m the last living Guardian of the Galaxy. Who are you?” He puffed his little chest up and stood at his full height, just reaching Dom’s chin even standing on top of the newsstand.

Dom kept her arms crossed and met his stare with an unimpressed look. “Unfamiliar.”

“Humiliation kink, that’s what it is!” Wade clapped, pleased with himself for finally figuring it out.

“What are you talking about?” the two of them said in unison, shooting him twin bewildered glares.

“The thing you’re into. You like women taking you down a peg or two, right? I knew there was something, and you’re definitely getting off on this conversation.”

“Do you like your dick? ‘Cause you’re talking like a guy looking to get his dick shot off.” Rocket pointed his gun at Wade’s crotch, and Wade had to flail away to avoid the shot. In the process, his boot caught on the hem of his cape and jerked him forwards a few steps over the curb and into the middle of the street.

“Fuck me,” he cried out as he fell to his knees on the concrete. He tried to stand again, but got tangled up in the cape and couldn’t get his legs free no matter how hard he kicked. He looked up when the ground started shaking and cursed louder.

Juggernaut had dropped the health store clerk and was stomping straight towards Wade with a menacing grimace, pounding one massive fist into the open palm of his other hand as he approached. “Wade Wilson, perfect timing. I’m lookin’ to deliver a beating, and you’re just right for a punching bag.”

Wade held his hands out as he continued to kick his way out of the cape, finally extracting himself with just enough time to roll away from Juggernaut’s fist. The asphalt cracked under the force, a minor crater forming on impact. “Juggie, no! Bad Juggie! Wade friend! Wade want help get Bae back! No smash Wade!” he tried, rolling back onto his knees and finally onto his feet just in time to evade another attempted blow.

“Fuck you, Wilson. You know I’m not the Hulk,” Cain snarled, finally connecting a blow to Wade’s solar plexus and sending him hurtling fifty yards into the solid concrete side of a building. 

Wade took a minute to recover and peel himself out of the stone façade. In the meantime, he watched Rocket jumping to higher ground in a tree, while Domino slunk back into the doorway of a flower shop and behind a ficus. 

“I’m sorry, Jugs. I didn’t mean to insult your delicate sensibilities,” he said as he brushed off the stone dust from his suit.

“You want to talk about delicate sensibilities?” Juggernaut asked as he stalked over to Wade again and tried to wrap a fist around his head. Wade ducked just in time and vaulted out of the way.

“Don’t rip me in half, please! The body’s new. I don’t want to wreck it already. It still has that new skin smell and everything,” Wade protested, rolling out of the way of another attempted snatch. Only his cape got caught on some broken concrete and held him back from rolling all the way out of Juggernaut’s way, and he ended up with a fist in his spine. Cain waited to see that he was fully incapacitated before turning and making his way back towards the health store.

“Fuck this cape!” Wade shouted. “I’m done with capes. How did Thor ever deal with this bullshit? I don’t care how majestic it makes me look. I will burn it off if I have to and then piss on the ashes.” He tore the end of the cape away as soon as he had full use of his limbs again and threw the shimmery fabric away from him, cursing under his breath the whole time.

“I knew that cape was going to get him killed,” he heard Rocket tell Domino from across the street. He flipped the two of them off and headed after Juggernaut, ripping strips off his cape as he went.

“Yo, Juggie, why you bullying that sweet little shop boy? I know he didn’t take your guy. Why don’t you leave him alone and talk to me?” he asked as he got closer, watching Juggernaut hold the poor kid above his head and shake him until a wet trail streamed down the seat of the kid’s khakis and his eyes crossed a little.

Juggernaut turned to glare at Wade, throwing the kid aside with the intent of going after Wade again. “You just can’t stay down like a good little bug, can you?”

“I’m like a cockroach, heavy on the cock. You’re trying to get Tommy Boy back, right? Consider this the one and only time I offer you a team-up. You want to flip this Thanos shit. I want to flip this Thanos shit. Let’s flip it together.” Wade spread his arms out in invitation, but Juggernaut had other ideas.

“You wanna flip something? Okay.” Juggernaut grabbed Wade by the ankle and flipped him up into the air. He went flying eight stories up and flailed all the way back to the concrete, feeling every bone break on impact. He blacked out.

-

When the world returned, the buzzing inside his head was so loud, he had to hold his hands over his ears to try to muffle it. It didn’t work. But over the buzzing, he could hear a distant voice berating something. “I need powdered eel extract. Your website said you had it. Where is it?!” 

A weak voice croaked back, “The website hasn’t been updated since the Incident, Mister. We sold out.” 

“Then get more in!” 

“We can’t.” Cough. “The supplier.” Cough. “Died” Cough. “With everyone else.”

“Get another one!” 

“What are you gonna do with powdered eel extract? Didn’t think a strong guy like you would have performance issues. Is it the steroids?” Wade asked, sitting up and squeezing his eyes shut when the world spun too fast as he did. He clutched his stomach, trying to breathe deep but not doing a good job of it. 

“Is he trying to get crushed to death?” Rocket muttered from somewhere behind Wade.

“Usually,” Domino answered, also behind him.

Wade opened his eyes again to see Juggernaut glaring so hard there was steam coming off his head—or that might have been the concussion. It was a close call. He climbed reluctantly to his feet, ignoring the imminent punch to the gut. “You’re trying to get Tom back, right?” he asked, looking Cain directly in the face for the first time in their entire exchange. It was hard with how high up his eyes were. There was just so much more to look at.

Also there were two of him.

“What’s it to you?” Juggernaut asked, some of the maybe-hallucinatory steam dissipating.

Wade felt emboldened by the fact that there was now firmly only one of him to push forward, hoping the lack of steam meant Cain was calming down. “I want the same thing. Well, not the same thing. I’d be cool with Tommy Boy falling off the tall side of a mountain, but I also want to undo what douche canoe did and maybe rip his gross purple dick off at the same time. Thought you might be interested in getting in on that action. Am I wrong?”

Juggernaut seemed to mull this over. It looked like a painful process, thinking. He glanced at the kid he still held ten feet in the air. “I’m already working on it.”

“Yeah, you know whatever weird mystic arts thing you’re trying isn’t going to work, right?”

That earned him a wry look, but he dropped the kid, who quickly scrambled away for his life with the fear of god in his eyes. “You got a better plan?”

“Uh... plan. Yeah, totally have a plan. Definitely wouldn’t want to go up against Thanos without a plan. Right, Rocket? We totally have a plan, don’t we?” Wade said, turning to Rocket for back-up, noting that he had climbed up a different tree and was now sitting on a branch just above Domino’s head on the other side of the block from where they’d both been before he blacked out.

“That idiot has a gauntlet that we think can work with the Infinity Stones. We’re gonna steal them from Thanos and snap our people back,” Rocket explained.

“How are you stealing the Stones back, exactly?” Domino asked, leaning back to look up at Rocket, brows raised.

“That’s his part of the plan,” Rocket said, waving a paw in Wade’s direction.

“That’s where you come in. Powerhouse like you? Thanos doesn’t stand a chance. You bring the smack down, we steal the Stones off his gnarled hand, Black Tom’s back to making you tea by the weekend. What do you say?”

His answer came in the form of a giant fist to the face. He ended up implanted in a building across the street, unable to pry himself out until his bones healed. Again. But while he struggled, Cain gave him a good long look and said, “I’m in.”

-

On the short list of people who could probably punch Thanos in the face and actually make a dent, Colossus was number four. Wade mentally calculated the other three while he stood on the steps of the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters, waiting for someone to answer the door. 1] Juggernaut 2] the Hulk 3] Carol Danvers 4] Colossus. He chanted the names to himself while he pushed the doorbell in tandem, bopping his head to the beat. 

Finally, the heavy wooden door swung open and Negasonic Teenage Angstfest glared him down. “Get the fuck off my porch, or I’m blasting you into vapor.”

“I missed you, too, sugar pie.” Wade booped her on the nose with a little coo and tried to push past her into the house, but her immovable arm blocked him. 

“You aren’t invited in. Go away,” she said with the kind of seething wrath that could have convinced Wade she breathed fire. With her weird powers, maybe she did.

“Well, aren’t we a grumpy one today? I just came by to see our mutual bestie, Colossus. I’ve been texting, but he must have forgotten to charge his phone, the silly billy,” he said in an saccharine falsetto, enjoying the increasing look of rage on her face. The tips of her ears actually started flaming.

“He’s gone, dumbass. Most of the school is, and the ones who aren’t fucked off to wherever. It’s just me, and I said you can’t come in.” 

Wade got a sick feeling in the bottom of his tum tum. “And Yukio?”

Ellie slammed the door in his face with a glare of death. His heart instantly broke. “Not poor, sweet Yukio. Fuck the plan, I’ll rip Thanos apart myself.” But first, explody ball of angst might be useful. He hadn’t wanted to include a youngster in his crew, but he was pretty sure she was twenty by now. He started on the bell again.

She must have put on noise-cancelling headphones or something, though, because ten minutes later he was still ringing the bell and there was still no answer. He cursed under his breath, knowing from experience that the front door was enchanted not to unlock without authorization. He was going to have to find a different way in, and figure out how he was going to convince her to join his team at the same time.

He snuck around the outside of the building testing windows until he finally climbed up a tree and onto a familiar balcony. In another timeline, he’d spent more nights than he should probably fess up to climbing that tree to watch a pretty little Irish lass sleep. Now he used it to break into her former home and find the snarky thorn in his side to convince her to help him.

“No,” is what she said when he tiptoed into the kitchen where she was making lunch, giant black headphones covering her ears. She didn’t even look up at him. 

“But we’re going to get them all back, Yukio included,” Wade insisted, sliding up next to her and gently pulling an earphone away from her ear so she could hear him. She snapped her head back from him with a sharp little growl.

“There’s no getting them back. There’s no beating Thanos,” she said, threatening him with the pointy end of her kitchen knife.

“How do you know anything about Thanos, honeybee?” he asked, leaning his chin on his fist, elbow propped up on the counter next to her.

“You think I haven’t been trying?” She jammed the knife in his shoulder and walked away, taking her sandwich with her. Wade wasn’t sure that was an invitation to follow, but he did anyway. She navigated through several hallways, down deeper into the house. It was so quiet without the other students around, no music or children bickering, no pretentious wheelchair-bound professors giving lectures about how to be a good and proper little mutant. 

Ellie opened the door to a room Wade had never been in before—at least not in that universe—and stopped in his tracks at the sight of Thanos, larger than Wade remembered him, uninjured, wearing the gauntlet that twinned his own, six shiny stones affixed to the knuckles. He smiled at the two of them, the smug smirk of a man who knew he had won. A cold chill drifted down Wade’s spine, followed quickly by a white-hot rage that caused him to pull the knife out of his shoulder before his brain caught up with what his hands were doing and hurl it right at Thanos’ giant purple forehead.

Thanos caught the blade in his ungloved hand and threw it to the side, his smirk widening. “Reflexes getting a little slow there, Wilson. No wonder Lady Death chose me.”

Wade straightened from his fighting stance, narrowing his eyes at the figure. “Normally, ripping you apart over and over again would totally be my jam, but we don’t have time for this.” He sheathed his katana, turning his attention to Ellie. “You need to update your records.” He pointed at the hologram’s unscathed left side. “The snap ruined his arm and fucked up his glove. And he’s not that tall.”

“You’re not that tall,” Ellie grumbled, walking over to a panel on the wall and pushing a few buttons until the hologram changed. It wasn’t exactly right, but Wade couldn’t fault her for trying.

“Have you been running through scenarios in here for the last two months? Talk about useless effort. Baby girl, this is how you end up in the psych ward. Believe me, I’m an expert.”

Ellie shot him a look, followed by a steel rod through his chest. Where it came from, Wade could only begin to guess. “Fuck you, Wilson. You have no idea what I’ve been going through.” 

Wade ripped the rod out with a grunt and threw it to the side, ignoring the arc of blood that followed. “Oh, are you the only one in the universe who lost someone? I didn’t realize. I’ll make sure to let everyone else know so you can mourn in peace.”

“Pathetic, the both of you,” Thanos interrupted, wielding his withered hand like he would be able to do anything with it when he could barely hold it higher than his elbow. 

“Shut up,” they said in unison. 

Wade pulled out a gun and shot the control panel and the scene of the dying planet Titan and the giant, talking ball of bird poop disappeared in one fell swoop, leaving them standing alone in a cavernous empty room lined in steel plating. Wade turned back to Ellie. 

“Maybe it’s a good thing Colossus is gone now. He would be really pissed at your for breaking that,” she told him, her hard shell cracking just a bit at the reminder.

“I’d suck his cock, and he’d get over it.”

“Can you not talk about my dead member’s… member. Jesus. Fucking. Christ,” she muttered to herself, turning away from him to fiddle with the knobs on the demolished machine. “Besides, we both know he’d never let you do that even though we all know you want to.”

“Of course I do! Have you seen him? I bet it’s huge.” Wade batted his eyelashes even though she couldn’t see it through the mask. The whites of his eye holes grew to nearly engulf the black. “You know you want to get him back. Him and Yukio and all the losers who go to this lame school… Do we really have to bring the rest of them back? Ol’ One Eye’s such a wet blanket. We could just leave him where he is. I’d even leave Jeanie there with him if I thought Logan wouldn’t rip my balls off and feed them to me. Again. If he ever returned my calls, that is.”

Ellie stood with her arms crossed, stone-faced, waiting for him to finish his ramblings. She wasn’t even pretending to try to fix the computer anymore, which was probably smart given that there was a giant hole in the processor. “I’m not working with you.”

“Of course not. It’s so much better to mope around in this big moldy house by yourself than try to do something. It’s not like I have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. I definitely don’t have the Juggernaut on my side or a shiny new gauntlet ready for snapping as soon as we get the stones. Definitely don’t have a luck magnet or a trigger-happy cybernetic space raccoon, either.”

“A what?” 

Wade perked up at the only interest she’d shown in his speech so far. “Rocket, Guardian of the Galaxy. Maybe you’ve heard of him?” he asked as casual-not-casually as he could.

“No.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got yourself set up nice and cozy over here, so I’ll just leave your to your teen angst and go find the next person on my list to join my team, then. Too bad. Bet the two of you would have gotten along. Well, maybe not. She’s a ray of sunshine and you’re Wednesday Addams in a yellow wetsuit, but whatever. You enjoy your sad face and eating your feelings. I hear ice cream’s great for sitting on your ass and mourning your girlfriend instead of trying to get her back.” He was laying it on a little thick, but there was no point in putting the kid gloves on. Ellie would do what she wanted regardless of what he said, but she might be more amenable to proving him wrong if he was a little bit mean.   

He walked away, letting the door to the Danger Room slam behind him. He stole three sandwiches and a sword on his way out. 

-

“So, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Iron Patriot are going up against Thanos, but you think we’re going to be the ones to beat him?” Domino asked. She was leaning against the dividing wall separating Wade’s living room from his kitchen, an apple in her hand and her usual unimpressed look in place. They had decamped to Wade’s safe house after Wade got back from the mansion—sans Negasonic—but Wade wasn’t sure how long they were going to be able to stay on the third floor with Cain weighing the whole room down. The couch he’d taken up residence on already looked like it had reverted back to it’s flat pack origins. The floorboards were going to be buckling soon.

Wade propped his boots up on the coffee table, only to drop them back to the floor where Cain glared at them for being too close to him. “I have a couple of secret weapons waiting in the wings, too, don’t worry.”

“The last time you had secret weapons waiting in the wings, half of them ended up mulched. That helipad still has a green stain.”

Wade shot Domino a look for the comment. “That happened a decade ago.”

Domino raised both her hands towards the ceiling in frustration, the apple flicking bits of peel on the floor. “It was three years ago, dumbass. Stop getting shot in the head.”

“But it's so fun. Makes me see pretty colors before the pain rolls in.” Wade grinned, getting a flash memory of the psychedelic light show he usually saw while his brains were knitting back together. Domino bit into her apple like it had threatened her mother, glaring at him.

“Was that really three years ago? But Vanessa’s been gone for years and years, hasn’t she?”

“Wouldn’t know. You never introduced us.”

“Does any of this have a point? Fluffy hair is right. I’ve seen those guys in action. If they couldn’t beat Thanos, how are we supposed to do it?” Rocket interrupted their discussion from his seat on the back of the chair opposite Wade, where he was busy cleaning a repulsor rifle that was larger than he was. Wade’s finger twitched with the urge to steal it from him.

“They have righteous anger, but they also have a pretty strong moral compass. Most of them won’t kill unless they have no other choice. And they don’t have this.” Wade pulled the Black Gauntlet out from under his chair where he’d stashed it when they picked his suit up before going after Cain. It didn’t gleam, as much as it sucked in all the light that hit it and emitted an ominous, unnamable power. It was even more intimidating sitting on his coffee table than it had been in space. All eyes narrowed in on it like a magnet. 

“What is that? That looks like the pictures of the glove Thanos had, only...” Domino started, all pretense of indifference gone from her face. 

Cain reached for it, but the same spark of red light that had zapped every other person who had tried to touch it shot out at his fingers. He snapped his hand back, shaking the fingers as if in pain. Wade had only seen him show pain once before, with an electrical power cable shoved up his ass. He growled and reached for it again as if to crush it, but the gauntlet zapped him again, the light brighter this time. 

“I wouldn’t do that,” Wade said, moving the gauntlet further away from him. Cain glared. 

“Why can you touch it?” he asked.

“It’s my mother. It knows me.” Wade stroked the black metal lovingly. 

“What is he talking about?” Domino asked Rocket.

“When Wade jumped into the star on Nidavellir to help forge that thing, we think his atoms might have merged with it,” Rocket explained. 

“And when I came back, this beauty gave birth to me. We have a close, familial connection,” Wade finished the explanation, stroking his cheek over the fingers of the glove. Domino took one look at him and set her half-eaten apple on the counter behind her with a sick expression.

“So no one but you can touch it? Fucking great,” Domino muttered, pacing away from them into the kitchen and back again. “What’s the plan, then? We steal the Stones and you use that thing to reverse all this? Could you even do that? Isn’t Thanos like a god or something?”

“He’s stronger than this idiot, but he’s not a god,” Rocket said. 

“But it still crushed his whole arm, didn’t it?”

“How do you know that?” Rocket asked, turning around to frown at her. “I didn’t see that on any of the Terra news cycles.”

“You have your ways, I have mine. That’s not the point right now. Could Wade even use the Stones? He might be indestructible, but he’s still technically human.”

“I had a star go through me. I think I can survive some glowing stones,” Wade lied. He knew as well as Domino did that this was probably going to kill him for good. Even Death had thought so. Wade being able to stay with her permanently as her concubine had been his only way to convince her to help him figure out what he would have to do to get the Stones to do his bidding. 

“Didn’t the raccoon just say it disintegrated you?”

“How about we worry about how we’re getting the Stones, first, and then we’ll worry about whether or not I bite the big one using them.” 

Domino looked less than pleased with this answer, but didn’t argue the point.

Rocket set his gun on the floor propped up against his chair and squared his shoulders, his expression flattening into a serious face. “We’re gonna need a bigger crew than this if we’re going to steal those Stones. Thanos might be injured, but he’s not dumb. And it’s not like this… talking boulder guy is capable of subtlety. Look at him.” Rocket waved his hand in Cain’s direction as if he wasn’t afraid of being flattened into roadkill by him. Cain seethed, but said nothing. 

“Or we could just go back in time and get them before he does. He’s got a time manipulator,” Domino said, indicating Wade. “You could probably charge it up with some of your space tech, give us plenty of jumps to find them.”

Rocket shook his head. “That doesn’t work. Thanos got the Stones, not us. We do that, and it’ll help a different reality. We’ll still be fucked.”

“Okay, then what’s the plan?”   
  


**Author's Note:**

> Even though I normally picture a generic pretty white boy with brown eyes and hair whenever I read Spideypool (thanks, comics!), the fact that this fic is a direct sequel to Infinity War means that this Peter is Tom Holland!Spidey. Peter and Wade are not a couple at the start of the fic, but they were best buds until Thanos snapped his fingers, and romance is end game. If it bothers you to read fics with Tom Holland!Spider-Man/Deadpool, give this one a pass.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you want writing updates from me, you can follow me on Twitter [@RonsPigwidgeon](https://twitter.com/RonsPigwidgeon), [Tumblr](https://mscaptainwinchester.tumblr.com/), [NewTumbl](https://mscaptainwinchester.newtumbl.com/), or [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/MsCaptainWinchester).
> 
> And if you'd like to come yell about Spideypool with me, join the 18+ Discord server I co-mod, [Isn't It Bromantic](https://discord.gg/cfZEbNv)!


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